Hir Wicked Style by Nightfall

Index

Chapter 1: Hakkai
Chapter 2: Gojyo
Chapter 3: Honshin
Chapter 4: Kanan
Chapter 5: Sanzo
Chapter 6: Gojyo
Chapter 7: Sanzo
Chapter 8: Honshin
Chapter 9: Goku
Chapter 10: Kanan
Chapter 11: Interlude: a brief account of battle
Chapter 12: Sanzo
Chapter 13: Hakkai part 1
Chapter 14: Hakkai (part 2)
Chapter 15: Sanzo
Chapter 16: Sanzo-Ikkou
Chapter 17: Cho Sakari (Epilogue 1/2)
Chapter 18: Gojyo: Goes Without Saying [2/2]
Chapter 19: The SEME at the End of This Fic!

Chapter 1: Hakkai

"Sanzo..." Goku began presently.

"Don't make me shoot you," Sanzo cut him off at once, an exhausted warning growl. His voice seemed faintly softer, perhaps, than usual, but it could have been fatigue, pain, or sheer relief at the death of someone who was not only a homicidal maniac but also had a bad case of wandering hands. This was perhaps what the handcuffs and chain had been for, if any of the gods had any sense whatever. In which case, probably not.

So Hakkai was prepared to ignore it. But then, in the strong, deep voice that was more to be expected, Sanzo blankly demanded, "The fuck?"

Hakkai slit open his good eye and, seeing nothing in front of him, closed it again. If anything menacing was behind them, Sanzo would shoot it or Goku would howl with glee and start bashing it with Nyoibou, but until then he was saving his energy. There was quite a lot of healing in his immediate future, after all. In fact, perhaps someone else might drive for a while. He was going to sit here with the light of his own world's sun warming his face and regenerate his qi for a few minutes, and if they really needed him, they could scream.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

"Oh, my!"

That was... Goku. Not alarmed, but surprised. Also a surprised Gojyo and three female persons who had happened on a battered jeep full of bleeding men.

Definitely Gojyo's territory. Gojyo could deal with it.

"Holy shit," Gojyo said after a moment, with the absent pleasure of the absolutely blindsided. "I'm stacked!"

"Are not!" Goku shouted, indignant. "Mine are bigger!"

Hakkai squeezed his eyes shut tighter, unobtrusively curled lower in his seat, and deliberately did not double-check his chest. There was, he thought severely, really no excuse for the kind of day he was having.

"It only looks that way 'cause you're a shrimp, monkey-boy," Gojyo sneered.

A shot rang out, cutting the air with a clear silvery whine. One of Sanzo's, not followed by a scream of pain. No need for concern, then. Although why Sanzo wasted sanctified crystal bullets on warning shots at people everyone knew he wasn't going to shoot...

"Watch your mouth," said Sanzo, but there was that soft, deadly tone to his sour Chang'An accent again, which was unusual. Tired or not, Sanzo was more of a snarler.

"Is your friend just going to sit there?" one of the women demanded in a jagged velvet alto that sounded disturbingly like Gojyo's 'I'm about to poke you' voice.

Yes. Yes, he was.

"But Saaaaaaaanzo," Goku said, "it's so weird. Look! Hey, hey, are they real? Are they?"

Another shot.

Jiipu screamed like squealing tires and suddenly Hakkai was sitting on nothing. "Hakuryuu!" he shouted, pushing the ground away with a splayed palm and twisting in midair. Before even landing, he snatched the keening little dragon out of the air with one cradling arm and with the other shot a blast of green fury towards the sound of the gun. Not that he could afford it, but it wouldn't be wasted. Hakkai didn't do warning shots.

His blast met a resistance that felt bizarrely familiar. It was, he saw when he was steady on his feet, green. The flickering shape behind it was curved.

"Cut it out, both of you idiots," Sanzo snapped irately.

In stereo.

Cautiously, he and his opponent lessened their force until her shield and his lance flickered out. He didn't bother to look at her. It wasn't a qi-blast that had shot his friend.

"Hakuryu," he crooned, dropping to his knees and spreading his friend out carefully on the ground. "Let me see." He stroked down the long, shivering back until Hakuryu unfurled, and took a delicate, sluggishly bleeding paw in his hand. "There," he murmured. "You'll be well in just--"

"Don't you fucking dare," Sanzo said, irritated. "The jeep's not our only casualty."

"But Sanzo," he returned equably, which was about all the enthusiasm he could muster, "Hakuryuu is the casualty which will keep us here."

He didn't need to mention, certainly not in front of unknown quantities with guns and qi and the devastatingly insidious power of giving Gojyo a set of breasts of his very own to play with (and why just him and Goku? Had they simply been unable to reach the front seat? Hakkai knew he hadn't gotten any, because if he had his balance would have been off and he would almost certainly have fallen on them), that if he used enough energy to heal them all completely or even well enough to get through a night outdoors, especially if there was no food or shelter to be had, then Sanzo was facing a very cranky, whiny morning with an incapacitated mediator and chauffeur.

"Hakkai," Sanzo growled in his 'I'm trying to make allowances, Jade Emperor only knows why I bother, and it's not working' voice, "we have a situation. Put the dragon fucking down."

"Excuse me, Sanzo," he said politely, "but the situation is not an urgent one, since Goku isn't hitting anyone, ne?"

"Goku," said Sanzo at once, "hit someone."

"Okay!" Goku said brightly, and a moment later he and Gojyo were fighting again.

Two of the young ladies--there were, he noted vaguely, four of them--were starting a giggly betting pool.

"Fine," Sanzo grumbled, defeated. "Just don't come crying to me later asking me to drive."

"I wouldn't dream of it," he said solemnly. "After all, it's really about time Goku learned, don't you think, Sanzo?"

Sanzo twitched. Sanzo glared. Sanzo had lost.

Of course, Hakkai would end up driving anyway, but the exchange was worth the energy for sheer entertainment value. And in any case, being bested would reassure Sanzo, who really worried too much.

"If you morons are finished playing around," the voice he'd decided to call Chang'An Marginally Liter said impatiently, "I for one would like to know what the fuck is going on."

"Are you finished, Hakkai?" Gojyo broke off screaming at Goku to ask.

"For the moment," he said, scooping Hakuryuu up in his arms. "All better, yes, Hakuryuu?" The dragon pii'ed at him affectionately and lifted his sleek head to bump their jaws together before swarming up to sit on his shoulders.

Finally he looked over at the young ladies, and crashed into green, green eyes, wide as the bowl of the sky, and a sweet, sweet voice that breathed, "Gonou?"

On the whole, he thought he would have preferred it if Gojyo had sprouted breasts.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
Hakkai (bows): Ohayo gozaimasu.
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU
Tenpou (waves): 'Hayo.
...
Tenpou: This is a very dull page, and it isn't very polite. Moving on!
Hakkai: (double take) Ano... excuse me, Tenpou-san, but what did that say? Did it say there will be a seme at the end of this fic?
Tenpou: Well, yes. So I think we should hurry, don't you, Hakkai-kun?
Hakkai: O.O I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Tenpou-san. You see...
(flashbacks to Chin Iisou, Hyakugun-Maou, the bat-youkai with the whip, Homura, that deranged illusion-maker from Requiem)
Hakkai: ...You see, Tenpou-san, the fact is (I'm ashamed to admit it, but) I don't really get along very well with semes.
Tenpou: O.O Why on earth not?!

Back to index

Chapter 2: Gojyo

"Oh, hell," Gojyo bit out, his guts clenching into a single, tight fist. "You don't mean this is--"

"It would appear so," Hakkai said faintly, cautiously, his face frozen into the Why Isn't Someone Killing Me Yet Please smile Gojyo had dared to hope was gone forever.

"Goddammit!" he yelled, punching Goku's limiter for lack of a more convenient target and barely even feeling the inevitable kicks in the shin. "I am fucking sick of illusions and robots and dolls and shikigami and mindfucks and people who think we're dead guys! He--" pointing at his own Sanzo, "isn't Konzen goddamn Douzi and he isn't--he isn't! He's Hakkai, dammit! Cho Hakkai!"

He was ignored. The two Sanzos, the short and lanky one with the stubborn chin and the even shorter one with the sarcastically arched eyebrows, looked at each other and everyone's injuries at the name of Konzen and exchanged a dour, skeptical look. Meanwhile, Goku had detached himself and he and his C-cup counterpart were poking curiously at one another. A lithe, long-limbed redhead with two scars on her cheek alternated between biting her lip at the hard-faced brunette (and here Gojyo had always been under the impression that Hakkai's lady was a honey) and eyeing all of their trousers. It was enough to make a rat laugh.

Or it would have been, except that said steel-eyed brunette and Gojyo's monocled buddy were frozen in place, staring at each other as though neither was sure which one was the ghost, which the demon.

Hakkai's opened once, just a little, mouthing the first breath of a name. Gojyo had seen him do it a thousand times before, but never while they were both admitting to being awake. Then he closed it again, and screwed up his eyes into a blank, blank, happy smile. "Well!" he beamed. "This is certainly an unusual encounter. I think all ten of us can agree that it merits some sort of investigation?" Gojyo almost smiled. It was just like him to include the transportation.

"I can agree, anyway," the other redhead drawled.

"I merit some food, Sanzo," the C-cup said plaintively. "I fought really, really hard, and it was lots of fun but now I'm sooooooooo hungry!"

"Sanzo," Goku said dolefully, "I'm hungry, too! My belly's soooooooooooooo empty, Sanzo!"

"SHUT UP!" the monks chorused, squeezing the bridges of their skinny aristocratic noses, and the shorter one added feelingly, "Fuck. Don't compete."

"I'm not travelling with two of him," Sanzo warned everyone futilely, making his voice as grim as he could to compensate for the fact that he wasn't going to get his way since there wasn't, as Hakkai had pointed out, much in the way of a sensible alternative.

"Who you calling a him!?" C-cup screeched, bouncing entertainingly. On somebody with Goku's ape-face, that was disturbing. "Sanzo! Sanzo! He's calling me names and he's got the Sutra!"

"I'm still wearing it, dumbass," Sanzette pointed out witheringly. She, unlike her companions, was a match for their monk down to the what-is-this-'comb'-you-speak-of haircut and the leather underwear, and her chest was bound, but he could tell. There was the chin, and then there were the hips.

"Oh."

"Perhaps," Hakkai smiled, a little desperately, "if our maps agree, we might head for an inn to continue this discussion. One which is close to here." After a moment he added, thoughtfully, "Very, very close."

"Well, Sanzos-sama," he and the other redhead started in an identical drawl, and stopped to look at each other. He waved her on chivalrously, and she tossed her hair coquettishly back at him, like a spray of new blood. She had some of it pulled back into a braid, high on her head. and it pulled together at the bottom with a collection of sharp-looking willow leaves, glinting sharp gold. Not a bad idea, that, although it was probably rough on her jacket. "I know at least one of you hates like poison to backtrack," she went on, "but at least one of our parties left a couple of people at the inn we were at last night, and it's only an hour or two away."

Sanzo looked like he'd eaten a ten-day-old lemon. Then he looked at all the blood on all eight of them, the sun fallen halfway down the sky, and ended up on Hakkai's bone-white lips. He shrugged gracelessly. "Do what you want."

The redhead giggled, and clutched her monk's arm. "I can't wait to see what Jien looks like as a girl. I bet he's some ugly-ass youkai."

Gojyo stared. "I was just thinking that," he muttered. Their Jien was still Jien?

"We need to get back," the brunette said tersely, turning around sharply. "Sakari will be hysterical by now." He noticed with interest that the other pair of crimson eyes slid away from her over an affectionate You Go Ahead And Tell Yourself That smile.

"Well," Hakkai said pleasantly. His eyes were still closed, but Gojyo swore his eyebrows had crawled closer together at the unfamiliar name. "Hakuryuu, if you wouldn't mind?"

The dragon hissed warningly at Sanzette, but transformed. They all piled back into the two jeeps, the other redhead vaulting behind their wheel without hesitation, but Hakkai bumped into Sanzo on the way to the driver's seat. "If you think you're going to crash us into a tree, you're even more of an idiot than I took you for," he said flatly.

"Sanzo," Hakkai said, with a tinge of helpless gratitude in his astonishment.

"I said move," Sanzo growled, choosing to take it as a challenge for the sake of his precious reputation. He wasn't fooling anyone, though, and Sanzette looked at him as though she'd caught him cooing at baby squirrels. It was only in the interests of solidarity against an unknown element that Gojyo refrained from snickering aloud.

They followed the ladies, since it was more important for that party to get back to where they'd been, if it turned out to be the same place, and also because Sanzo, although not too bad at actually handling the car, wasn't used to navigating and driving at the same time. The drive back was unusually subdued, partly because they all felt like shit but mostly because Gojyo preferred looking good in front of beautiful women to fighting with the monkey. It was, for once, Sanzo who broke the silence.

"Goku," he said in a flat I Accept That Life Happens Just To Annoy Me voice, "what are those women?"

"Huh?" Goku stared up at him. His eyes were even wider than usual from the shock of being spoken to without hostility by the light of his infantile life.

"The women," Sanzo snapped, thus remedying the situation. "What are they?"

"Well, they're people, Sanzo," he said, frowning in confusion. "Just like us!"

Sanzo looked slowly at his three companions: the half-breed, the changeling, the immortal without a named species. He looked around for someone to exchange a speaking, suffering glance with. Hakkai's eyes were fixed on the clear sky, though, long lips pulled tight around the outside of an empty chuckle, so he had to have it with Gojyo, much to his disgust. Just to annoy him, Gojyo put a friendly arm around the kid's shoulders and grinned sunnily, which resulted in a surprised, delighted smile of Goku's own. Something eased in the monk's forehead at that, and Gojyo could have sworn he saw the corner of that dour mouth relax up a millimeter in the instant before Sanzo hmphed and turned around.

"They're real, Goku?" Hakkai asked in a tone of friendly, distant interest, his knuckles whitening on the top of the car door. "And not youkai?"

Gojyo had bullied his way into Goku's usual seat for the express purpose of being able to lean forwards and drape himself on Hakkai as though everything was business as usual (and so Hakkai wouldn't have to brace himself against loud monkey-qi at his back), and did so now, ruffling the kid's hair on the way forwards. "Yeah, apeface," he teased, "what'd you sniff out with your wonder-nose?"

"Don't call me an ape!" Goku screeched.

So, half a second behind him, did the other one.

"Oh, dear," Hakkai chuckled, sounding stressed. "It would appear that their conversation is progressing along similar lines."

"You mean their Sanzo is as much of a nasty, suspicious-minded bastard as ours?"

"I think, Gojyo," Hakkai smiled, "that we have no information yet to be suspicious of."

"Chop-logic," he said affectionately, tightening his grip on Hakkai's arm with the hand Sanzo couldn't see, and was rewarded by feeling one shoulder lower half an inch against his chest. "Our boy doesn't need any damn information to be suspicious. General principals are good enough for him."

"Which is why I REPEAT, FOR THE LAST TIME, Goku," Sanzo bellowed, eerily echoed from the other car, "What. Are. They."

"But Sanzo, I said!" Goku reminded him, wounded. "They're just people like us. Two humans and one of them who smells like Gojyo got some girl's perfume all over him, and the other one doesn't smell like anything."

"Two humans," Hakkai whispered distantly, going tight again.

Gojyo sat back as Sanzo's hand tightened on the wheel. "Whaddaya mean?" he asked, turning to Goku and frowning. "Like she isn't there?"

The kid shook his shaggy head, untroubled. "Uh-uh. Just no smell. Like my laundry."

Gojyo grinned, only partly in relief. "Believe me, monkey-boy, your laundry smells like something."

"Look who's talking, you stinking hentai roach!! And don't call me a monkey! SAN--"

"SHUT UP, both of you," Sanzo roared, nearly driving them off the road as he turned on pure instinct to clobber them both with his harisen. Hakkai went ash-pale and dove across his lap to grab the wheel, just barely keeping them on course.

"Shit, Sanzo, focus! Watch the fucking road!"

"Me focus, you lamebrain cockroach?" Sanzo spat, turning an ugly, incredulous red. "You've got yourself some--"

"Hakuryuu," Hakkai said softly, his hands still the only ones on the wheel, "Please stop." The wheels stopped turning at once, and he gave them all a strained, fixed smile of pure iron. "I think, Sanzo, that on the whole, I would prefer to drive."

Sanzo flicked a disdainful eyebrow and sat back with a careless shrug, waiting to get out until Hakkai had opened the door for him.

As soon as everyone was seated again, Hakkai zipped them up next to the other car. "Is it Miss Sha?" he asked politely.

"Sure is," she grinned at him appreciatively. "And is it--"

"In that case, Miss Sha," he cut her off with that same gritted, polite, end-of-the-rope smile, "If you will forgive us, we will meet you there. Please feel free to shout if we make an unexpected turning." And with that, he floored it.

The jeep's top speed wasn't very impressive without adrenaline in the fuel, but it was faster than the others were going. Goku waved cheerfully as they pulled ahead. Since their Sanzo was also in the front seat and their Hak--their brunette wasn't, Gojyo indulged in the kind of grin that made people lose their tempers and control of their game, and also waggled his fingers bye-bye.

The other redhead, seeing this, whooped, "Like hell you will!" Her jeep surged forwards, too, and before long they had overtaken the men again.

"Lazy-ass fat dragon," Sanzo sniffed disdainfully, and Hakuryuu loosed a hiss of steam out of his front vent. Suddenly they were in front again.

"Come on, Su-chan," the other redhead said to her jeep, half-coaxing, half a jeer. "You can do better than that!"

'Su-chan' could.

"Come on, Hakkai," Gojyo urged excitedly, leaning across Goku to shake his arm. "They're catching up!"

"I'm not trying to race, Gojyo," his friend gently corrected. "Only to return as quickly as possible."

"Well, gee, 'Kai," he drawled, "if we aren't as going as fast as possible, we obviously won't get there as quickly as possible. Chop that logic."

"Hmn," Hakkai frowned so cheerfully that Gojyo almost believed him. "You may have a point. What do you think, Hakuryuu?" The jeep pii'ed fiercely, and revved his engine just in time to not get passed.

"Ha!" Goku brayed indiscriminately to Gojyo and the other redhead. "Eat dragon dust!"

Gojyo bopped him on the head, saying, "I'm right here, idiot."

"Eat this!" the other driver crowed, pulling alongside and ahead.

Hakkai, pinned between eager pleading from the backseat and the twitching vein in Sanzo's stony jaw, sighed, "Oh, dear."

They made it in twenty minutes.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: (brightly brittle) Ne, Tenpou-san, I have a suggestion. If we don't click any links, we won't reach the end of the fic. Which would be a very good thing, because there is a seme at the end of the fic. So please don't click the link, if you wouldn't mind (heart).

Tenpou: Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Hakkai-kun. Ikuzou!

Hakkai: (youkai) Don't make me hurt you.

Tenpou: (kami) (eyebrow)

[end part 2]

Back to index

Chapter 3: Honshin

Notes: As we begin to see here, Kanan is ooc. There are a couple of very good reasons for that, so please trust me a little longer...

If you bypassed the name notes before, this is a good time to check them out.

They beat the men to the inn, but only because Honshin vaulted out from behind the wheel as soon as they were parked and dashed inside, Kanan and Kaikara half a step behind her. It also had something to do with the way the pretty, pretty man in green who she wasn't touching with a ten foot pole threw the race by shooing everyone out of his dragon so he could coddle it. Suzuyuki eyed them with one beady red dragon-eye, looking a little jealous.

The innkeeper's jaw dropped when he saw them, which was a mistake. Honshin barely had time to feel Kanan's qi spike to cold fury before her friend had him by the collar. "Why, Hirahara-san," she purred into his elderly face. "You seem distressed."

"Ch-ch-ch-cho-san," he stammered, black eyes wide and pronouncing it wrong. Honshin winced; if someone had called her a pig she would have gutted him, and Kanan had already had a bad day. "Forgive me! Forgive me! Your sacrifice will never be forgotten! Unless your honor prefers that it be forgotten as soon as humanly possible, in which case, haha, what were we talking about again?"

"Why, I'm sure I don't know, Hirahara-san," she smiled, glittering. "What are we talking about?"

He drew back his arm hard and high, so that when he pointed at her chest he didn't actually touch it.

"Put him down, moron," the unmistakable voice of a bored Sanzo said. It was the natural baritone voice, though, not the familiar forced tenor. He was lucky their own monk hadn't shot him on sight just for having a chest that fit his robes. "Obviously he was expecting us, not you. Hirahara. We want our rooms back."

"So do we," their own Sanzo droned, strolling in with the ape at her heels. She was going to hurt her throat if she tried to force her voice any lower, Honshin noted with a grin.

"Never mind the rooms, Sanzo," Kanan said, dangerously pleasant. "I want my daughter."

"And my brother," Honshin reminded her.

"And Jien," Kanan agreed graciously.

"Your daughter?" a faint voice asked from the door. They all turned to look at the green man, smiling with tight lips and clutching his dragon a little too hard. The eye Honshin could see was haunted as it flicked to her hair briefly and back to Kanan. "Is she...?"

"You got a problem?" Honshin asked belligerently. It seemed incredible that someone related to Kanan could hate half-and-halves, but there he was, looking sick. Not even just sick--gutted.

"Of course," he said, abstractedly forthright and not looking at her at all anymore. It hurt more than she'd expected. She actually had to remind herself that she didn't care what he thought.

"Cho-san!" the innkeeper exclaimed in a tone of great relief, as though the green man was his last possible hope of safety in a world gone completely cracked. "Your rooms, of course. Is this your sister?"

Honshin drew in a sharp breath as they turned scarlet and white. She waited for the answer, but it didn't come. The green man just pulled himself together and smiled with perfect assurance, asking, "I'm afraid there are eight of us, Hirahara-san. Can you accommodate us?"

"My daughter," Kanan repeated, deadly.

He did turn, then, his face iced over with polite inquiry. "Did your daughter or, Sha-san, your brother, accompany you to the fight with Homura?"

"Course not," Honshin scoffed. "She's only three. And he always ignored Jien, so we figured he was the one to stay back and watch her this time."

"Then, since Hirahara-san was expecting our party rather than yours. I think it likely that he is still staying back and watching her where you came from," he said and hesitated. After a moment, he added, respectfully, "Cho-san."

Honshin blinked. There was that wrong inflection again. "Boar?" she asked Kanan blankly.

"Cho," Kanan said grimly, not to her. Butterfly, the reborn, the name she hadn't shared with Honshin until after Sakari was born. But she had relaxed, like he was making sense to her.

The green man's lovely chest compressed as though someone had punched it. "Of course," he agreed distantly. "How appropriate, Cho-san."

"Rooms?" the Sanzos broke in impatiently, and glared at one another.

"Rooms," the other redhead agreed lazily, strolling in with a froth-mouthed teenager gnawing furiously at his hair. He pointed at the green man. "You, sleep, now. So I can--"

"Oh?" he was interrupted, the brittle expression smoothing into a teasing smile. It didn't light up his face, but it made her want to lick it away. "Will you tuck me in, Gojyo?"

"I told you already," the other redhead mock-scowled, throwing his arm and hooking his chin over tattered green shoulders to scold right into his fashionably-cuffed ear. "I ain't carrying any more men to bed."

Honshin blinked slowly. So that was his name. The important thing, though, was that Kanan was smiling, for whatever weird reason. It wasn't much of a smile, sad and wistful, nothing like the sudden blinding one on her counterpart's face, but there it was.

Chinks in armor were made for attacking. And hey, if the other guy could snuggle people, so could she. She dove at the taller monk, wrapping herself all around his scrawny, muscley arm, and purred, "I wanna stay with this one tonight, Sanzo. Isn't he pretty? Hirahara, make sure you get us a nice, big bed."

"GET THE FUCK OFF ME!" he bellowed, horrified.

She giggled, flirting up at him through her eyelashes. "Ooooh, Sanzo, he screams just like you!"

"What are you implying, slutroach?" Sanzo hissed, incensed.

"Why, Sanzo," Kanan chuckled, almost at ease now, which was of course the point, "is there something you should be telling us? I'm afraid the Sanbutsushin will be terribly shocked. Whatever happened to your vows of chastity?"

Sanzo glared. As was happening more often lately, to Honshin's private amusement, there was a suggestion hiding behind the annoyance that Kanan, by teasing her on this topic, was being a moron.

"Huh?" Kaikara blinked up at them with her huge golden eyes. "Did something happen? Sanzo! Are you keeping secrets? What's a chastity, Sanzo? Can you eat it?"

"Hirahara-san!" the other monkey bounced, scrambling off wassname, Gojyo's head with a colossal bounce. "We aren't too late for dinner, are we? I want rice and soup and mantou and pork noodles and eggs with chicken and mushrooms--"

"And tea eggs," Kaikara agreed, nodding vigorously. "And watercress and smoked fish and jiaozi and sweet-bean dumplings."

The tall monk stopped struggling against Honshin and sighed, drooping slightly. With resignation, he produced what looked a lot like the Gold Card from out of his sleeve, and handed it to the innkeeper. "Rooms first," he said firmly.

"Of course, Sanzo-sama," Hirahara hastened, relieved, and the man-monk steamed quietly. "I only have three rooms, you know. I'll get the keys." He scurried out, and was back before anyone could start bickering again.

"Kick someone out," Honshin suggested helpfully. "You can do that for the great Sanzo-Houshi-sama, can't you?"

"No, Sha-san," the green man said helpfully, taking the keys from the innkeeper, who hastened back to wherever he'd gone to get them. "There really are only three rooms."

She scowled at him. "How do you know?"

He blinked at her mildly, and smiled, flicking a quick, amused, censorious look at the other redhead. "I heard."

The youngest man's eyes nearly fell out of his face as Gojyo valiantly tried to look nonchalant. "Hakkai!" he gasped. "Are you turning into a pervert like Gojyo? Sanzo! That pervert corrupted Hakkai!"

"This is news?" their Sanzo drawled.

Now the other kappa just looked proud.

"Now, now, Goku," the green man said primly, smiling with closed eyes, probably so as to avoid meeting anyone's gaze. Kanan looked mortified on his behalf. "Not everyone can sleep as soundly as you. I could hear into your room, as well..."

A round of stifled coughing swept the room as the two chief snoring offenders vibrated in indignation and demanded to know what had been meant by that.

"Well," Gojyo said, still snickering a little. "At least two of the rooms are sets of doubles." Everyone looked at him with pursed lips and raised eyebrows, and he tossed his hands up and grinned. "All right, so the other one is, too."

"Plenty of beds, then," the Hakkai man said firmly, pleasantly. "And perhaps Hirahara-san will be able to provide futons. Goku, will you help me bring the luggage in?"

"Why can't Gojyo do it?" the boy scowled, but it must have been an automatic response, because he was asking on his way to the door.

"Gojyo has been stabbed recently," the Hakkai man reminded him.

The door closed on a whine of, "That was yesterday!"

"I brought ours when I came in, didn't I, Sanzo? I was on the ball, wasn't I?"

"Shut up and stop fishing," Sanzo drawled at her pet, and turned a morose look on Kanan. "I expect you'll want to hear that monkey snoring," she said sourly.

Kanan looked from her to the steaming man who still hadn't managed to escape from Honshin. "Perhaps it's best," she said, a little calmer now she wasn't looking at her lover's ghost, "that we all be equally inconvenienced. I'm sure your party also, sirs, has spent a night in one room before."

Honshin scowled at her from behind the monk's skinny shoulders, but her friend had Adamant Face on. "Fine," she huffed and, obeying the coded message, started sneaking the gold card back into the monk's capacious sleeve.

"Hell with that," the man said coolly as his companions came back in with backpacks, and turned a disdainful look on the kids. "I'm sleeping tonight."

"What a good idea, Sanzo!" the Hakkai man beamed. "I don't think there would be anything inappropriate in the children sharing a room, do you?" he asked the room at large. Both monks glared at him, then at each other, clearly evaluating their chances of getting the spare room to either of themselves. It ended in disgruntled mouth-twists and a mutual bow to the inevitable.

The boy's eyes almost fell out again. "You mean," he gushed gleefully, "I get a bed, Sanzo? A real bed? All mine?"

"Can we eat now?" Kaikara asked plaintively.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: (a twitching pile of despair) You... you clicked the link.

Tenpou: Of course! (heart)

Hakkai: You know, Tenpou-san, I thought karma was supposed to catch up in your next life.

Tenpou: ...This is your next life, Hakkai-kun. Ne, cheer up! A gentle rain caresses the cherry blossoms, Kanzeon Bosatsu's put jasmine insense in the halls today, I just got a new shipment of manga from the Under-heaven, and somewhere out there is a redheaded ruffian with no sense of delicacy who is willing (dreamy) to do all the work.

Hakkai: (despondant) Rain. That's all I needed.

[end part three]

Back to index

Chapter 4: Kanan

Several interminable minutes later, it having been explained to the younger members of their party that no one had been shopping in several days, due to the pressing kami problem, and that they were going to have to make do with snacks until dinner, Kanan snuck around the outskirts of the icy purple-on-purple death-glare of Who Gets To Wash Up First. She dodged adroitly into the bathhouse, closing the door behind her with a pointed bang and a sweet smile into their scowling faces. With a sigh of relief, she toweled down quickly and finger-combed the bits of rice cake out of her braid, then proceeded into the main chamber.

It was already occupied.

She took a moment just to look at him, his impossibly familiar lines, and the body between them so changed, thin and hard and weary and scarred here and there, still wearing those silly earcuffs. Ragged bites on his arms and wrists and an old burn in the shape of a hand. A pucker by his shoulder where something had missed the heart, and where his fringe fell away from his eyes with his head tipped back like that, red claws. Lash-marks on his chest to match some that she herself had disdainfully healed away, and something deep disappearing under the water.

Gonou could never have looked like that. Her sweet Gonou, long hair brushing his shoulders. His glasses would have steamed up in this bath, and his soft, schoolteacher's body would never have survived the least of those wounds. He would have wept to see hers.

This one, cold and false and sculpted as she herself, fair as an ice statue, still and silent although she knew he knew she stood there--what tears could melt him?

"Well," she said deliberately, to the shock he should have at least pretended to have, "it isn't as though you have anything I haven't seen, Cho-san, is it?"

"Perhaps not entirely accurate, Cho-san," he murmured at once, keeping his eyes closed, ridiculously, like a gentleman. "But true enough, I suppose. Please, come in."

"My daughter," she said, slipping into the hot water that, with him in it, was a torturous purgatory. "You're sure she's all right?" She'd nearly lost her once, before they'd even had a chance to meet. Sakari, the only important thing left in the world with Gonou gone. If it hadn't been for the miracle of Honshin, she would have bled her daughter out into that dusty road and died there with her gladly.

"I'm sure," he said, opening his eyes in surprise, "that there's nothing any of us can do about it until we know what brought you here, Cho-san."

"Homura, I should think?" she suggested.

"Specifically," he corrected himself. After a moment, gently, "I know that Gojyo's brother has gone to fantastic extremes to protect those in his care. Your Jien would do no less; of that I am sure."

"If he's survived to do it."

"Well, yes," he admitted, sitting up. He was doing, she had to concede, a better job of keeping his eyes on her face than Gonou could have managed. "However, the only way I can think of at the moment to send you back is to bleed Sanzo until Kanzeon Bosatsu descends from heaven to give him a blood transfusion, at which point we could ask her."

She couldn't help it. She started to laugh.

Encouraged, he smiled tentatively. "However, since the last time we tried that Gojyo was walking into walls for the rest of the day..."

"Honshin's face was priceless," she agreed, still laughing. "And Jien looked like he was going to kill someone!"

"Ah," he said delicately. "Does it lie that way?"

She shrugged, met his gaze evenly. "And if it does?"

He lifted a dripping hand on the surface of the water, open-palmed. "It can be a mistake," he said lightly, "to allow a single person to become the world. My friend knows how to guard his heart."

"Hm," she said noncommittally. Someone was fooling himself. She'd seen the look on both their faces when his 'friend' had clung to him.

He flashed a quick, bitter smile at her. "Still, I think we have nothing to say in the matter, you and I."

"No," she said, returning it ache for ache. "I think not." He did let his gaze drop, then. It warmed her, and she expected him to come and hold her. He closed his eyes after only a moment, though, his face tight. "You aren't much like him," she said, matching his light tone.

"Nor you," he returned, eyes still closed. "She was never so angry. Even when that official tried to take her away from me, she said she wasn't worried; she knew I could take care of her."

"I was angry all the time," she said, surprised, but also because he looked like was about to choke. "And when that horse-faced man tried to court me with his cat's breath I threw our dirtiest dishwater out the window on him."

"Ah," he said, opening his eyes with a tiny, almost sly and very un-Gonou-like smile. "The direct approach."

"Oh?" she asked, smiling herself.

"Xia Xiaopeng," he said. "Did you know her? We invited her over when he had said he would come."

"The carpenter's daughter? With no looks and a voice like a jackal?"

"She was very pretty when you--when she--Xia-san was very pretty in a jacket that suited her, and with her hair done. She was a sweet girl, and very bright."

"I hope you told her to hold her tongue."

"Yes--and she--not Xia-san--she spilled hot tea in his lap. Xia-san was most solicitous..."

"Quietly?"

"Oh, yes. Until the wedding."

"Oh, dear," she said, with a vicious little smile. "My idea?"

"Well, no," he confessed, smiling back. "Mine, I'm afraid."

"Gonou would never have thought of something like that," she said soberly. "He was so sweet... he trusted everyone."

"More than I should have. Beyond reason," he said, with a ruthlessness that was all for himself, and then he looked up and smiled at her, painfully. "And yet, you know, Cho-san, she always told me I was too suspicious. Too serious."

"I handled our money to keep them all from cheating him."

"I never wanted to her to know how they tried. She was so happy to have faith, you see."

"She was very lucky," Kanan suggested after a moment, pushing off the wall and going over to sit next to him, "to have someone who could take care of her."

His mouth twisted. "Perhaps not. Perhaps, if I had been strong enough to disillusion her, she would have dared to live, as you did."

She shrugged. "Survival... it's something one does, if it can be managed." Gonou hadn't managed. Sweet Gonou, slipping through the shadows, slipping poppy into youkai tea. Soft Gonou, coming too late with the keys, turning with that surprised look into the efficiant slash of youkai claws, and then nothing but red until the blazing white of her raging despair brought the grey castle tumbling to dust.

"I agree," he nodded quietly, and quietly added, "She didn't."

"Survive?"

"Agree."

"Ah," she said cautiously.

"Speaking of survival, Cho-san," he said lightly after a moment, leaving her to understand that The Subject Was Closed, "I hope you'll forgive me for asking, but I'm very curious about something. On your way to Homura, did you also encounter a room full of zombies?"

"Yes, we did."

"I think," he said judiciously, taking his eyes from her face for the first time to give her a clinical once-over that was more galling than embarrassing, "that our method was not the one you used to get rid of them. Tell me, how did you get past?"

"Oh, we fought our way to the door, and then I blew the walls out. Maybe they made it out from under the ceiling eventually, but we were gone by then."

He blinked, looking impressed, and then smiled ruefully. "It's very creative of you, Cho-san! I should have thought of that."

"Oh? What did you do?"

He looked down at his hands, still with that wry little smile on, and shrugged. "Oh, well, as to that."

"Ah," she said after a moment. "The direct approach."

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: Eheheh. It seems you don't understand, Tenpou-san. You see, clinking the links will bring us to the end of the fic, and there is a seme at the end of the fic.

Tenpou: (a huge lech) I understand that very well, Hakkai-kun! 8^3 ...It's your reluctance I find inexplicable.

Hakkai: Clearly. However, this will stop you from clicking the links. See?

(Pulls out Sanzo-action figure and pulls the string in the back. Sutra does its thing.)

Hakkai: There! The pages are immobilized, so you can't--

Tenpou: (klik)

[end part four]

Back to index

Chapter 5: Sanzo

Notes: I know this story starts out confusing. Thanks for sticking with me for those of you who are, and I hope the direction of the story, at least, is starting to clear up.

"Have your tea party some goddamn other place!" Sanzo yelled, pounding on the door of the bathhouse because it would take more of an idiot than she was to shoot at Kanan even in a much better mood than this.

The other one snorted. "That won't work," he said.

She eyed him with dislike. He stared flatly back at her, unimpressed.

Nearly a whole minute later, they both turned away from each other and sat down on opposite ends of the stoop. Eventually, he produced a newspaper, put on a pair of thin, frameless glasses, and started to read it.

After another long minute or so, she asked, "Anything in the area?"

He lowered the paper and turned, looking at her over the rims of his spectacles. "Hn," he said, and handed her a section.

"Hm," she thanked him, and brought her own glasses out.

Eventually, they switched.

"Sanzo," a cheerful tenor startled her, and she looked up slowly to see Kanan looking almost natural on her pseudo-brother's arm. "We're finished now," he went on to say. "Since there are so many of us, shall we fetch Gojyo and Goku or Sha-san and the other young lady first?"

Sanzo snorted instead of answering, and stood up, saying to Kanan, "He's good."

"Better than I would have thought," Kanan agreed, and Sanzo's eyes narrowed. That hadn't been a compliment, and the brother knew it.

She'd work it out in the bath. "I don't bathe with the women," she said, and turned on her heel to go in.

"Who do you think you're fooling," her counterpart asked coolly.

She didn't turn to look at him. "Practically everyone," she returned, equally coolly. "I don't like to be bothered."

"Sanzo gets bothered anyway," the brother said, a sly, affectionate jibe in his voice.

"Perhaps less," Kanan suggested, and that was a reprimand.

"Well, possibly," he said mildly, disagreeing.

"You're not fooling anyone here," the other monk said, and she knew he was thinking that if he didn't get to bathe alone, neither did she. But she could smell him distrusting those two arms linked together as much as she did. "Even an innkeeper can count up to four."

"I can count to eight," Kanan said. "We'd better go shopping."

"I can count to twelve," her brother countered cryptically, and his monk snorted agreement. "We should take your card, Sanzo. It's impossible to know whether theirs will work here."

"All the more reason to try it first," the other monk drawled.

"I suppose you have a point," his companion laughed, looking nervous. He wasn't nervous. She didn't need diplomacy. Who did he think he was, considering her feelings? They were none of his business.

"Hell if I care," she shrugged, and passed her card to Kanan before heading in towards the hot water. "It's not my money."

"We'll send Kaikara in," Kanan assured her soothingly.

Sanzo stopped, jerked her head halfway around, stared at her friend incredulously. "Kanan," she said flatly. "If you start taking lessons from this two-faced snake-in-the-grass I will kick your ass all the way back to Chang'An and live off takeout and jerky for the rest of the trip."

"Ahaha," Kanan's brother said hastily--it really was a word the way he said it, not a laugh--and, shooting Sanzo a dirty look from behind his even smile, ushered his amused sister away.

"You're too late," the other monk said from behind his newspaper. "That behavior doesn't get unlearned."

She glared at him, and elected not to inquire. He was almost certainly right, anyway, regardless of how he knew; those slippery, helpful barbs of his talanted Hakkai's were much too useful for her ruthless Kanan to discard lightly. Instead, she asked, "And after dinner?"

"We sleep."

"And in the morning?"

"You go home."

"How?" she demanded.

He just shrugged. "Saa."

"You don't know," she accused him flatly.

He lowered the newspaper, looked at her impassively. "The same way you came," he explained, as though to a child and also as though it gave him great satisfaction, the smug bastard. "I suspect."

"You must be a man of great faith, Kouryuu Sanzo-Houshi," she mocked. "How pleasant it must be to trust in the gods. They don't give a flying fuck if we win or die. Maybe some celestial money will change hands. The beaurocrats will fret. The Merciful One will sulk. They won't let that matter."

"No," he said, with a bitter tone she recognized, one that quieted her. "No, the gods save no one."

"If you know that," she started, and was cut off when he put the paper down altogether.

"But I also know how that two-faced snake-in-the-grass thinks," he said without acrimony.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What do you know that I don't?"

"My own name, to begin with," he drawled, "Kouryuu-kun."

"Kouryuu yourself," she snapped. She didn't need him being diplomatic with her either. "It's Shoutai."

He blinked, unimpressed. "Genjo."

"Whatever," she said, and turned on her heel again. "I'm going to take my bath."

"You'll do as you please," he said curtly. "Sanzo."

She held still for a moment, and then breathed out, letting her shoulders down a notch. "If you see my monkey, Sanzo," she said without inflection, "tell her to get her smelly ass in here."

"If I feel like it," he said maddeningly. And so, as she finally made it into the bathhouse,her lips were turned upward.

Just a little.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: YOU CLICKED ANOTHER LINK! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO ME!

Tenpou: (aside) Does living make everyone this high-strung?

Hakkai: (slumped) How did you do that, anyway?

Tenpou: (pats his shoulder) Welcome to the Internet, Hakkai-kun.

Hakkai: Ah. (glum) Note to self: next time, aim for the mouse.

[end part five]

Back to index

Chapter 6: Gojyo

Notes: The poem is by Li Bai, of course, in my own translation. And yes, that's all there is to it. On the other hand, you can find out about Chang E through google.

When the two of them approached him, Gojyo was wringing water out of his hair. "Hey," he grinned at hatchet-face's surprise, "I ain't competing with Sanzo and four women for a tub of hot water. Nothing wrong with the river in this weather."

"Oh?" Hakkai asked. He had no less than two helpless smiles on. Gojyo was impressed. The You're Too Much smile was the one that was meant to seen, but Rescue Me Now was somewhere underneath. "Then perhaps, Gojyo, you would like to go shopping with us."

"Why not?" he agreed amiably, mostly for the sake of making everyone stare. "I need a new lighter."

"I think that can be managed," Hakkai said placidly.

"Oh, you do?" Gojyo growled, grinning, and charged him, swooping him away from her with hands wrapped around his arms, towards the road. "Think you could manage a couple of packs, too?"

"Gojyo!" Hakkai laughed, going along with him, and there was only one smile on his face. That was what Gojyo liked to see. "In fact, we should probably get several. Do your companions also smoke, Cho-san?"

"Quite a lot," she said drolly. "Not Kaikara, of course. And under the circumstances, perhaps some beer would be in order."

"Quite a lot," another woman echoed, just as drolly, and they turned to see the other kappa coming around a bend in the river, towelling water out of her hair. She blinked at their surprise, and said, "What? I ain't competing with Sanzo for a hot tub. Nothing wrong with the river in this weather."

"Heeeei," Gojyo said softly, right in Hakkai's ear. "That's just creepy."

"Oh?" his friend returned, just as quietly. "That she said it, too?"

"Nah," he grinned, tightening his grip on black-clad biceps. "That a women was naked in the river with me and I didn't know about it."

If someone had called him on it, he would have had to admit that it was a ridiculous thing to say with his hands wrapped around black cotton and two cool limiters brushing his nose. But he could see very short columns of numbers adding up behind those alien green eyes, and the too-familiar crimson ones were all over them both, stroking like embers, and Hakkai's back against him was loose and warm.

In this situation, it probably said something about him that the best part was the sight of those fierce eyes registering his warning, but he didn't care. He didn't care what she thought of the warning, either. She was dangerous.

But, "Gojyo," Hakkai sighed in fond reprimand, as though that was all there was to say about that, and fluidly moved off him.

Even that felt good. Even when he held out a hand and linked arms with her. A couple of hours ago Hakkai had been dragging his feet along as though he didn't have legs, poured off Gojyo's shoulder and shaking. By tomorrow he'd be straight as an oak again, as though there'd never been such a creature as a Homura or a Shien, and Gojyo was willing to bet that not only the green tunic but Sanzo's slashed tank would be immaculately mended. The rate at which Hakkai had been bouncing back lately was intensely reassuring.

There was something to be said for this willowy exhausted stage, though. In duplicate, yet. If the journey had made the Kanan-creature a little too pinched in the face, her figure was still nothing to sneeze at, and she walked straight and smooth. The other one wasn't walking away from him, though, and every angle was inviting him to come on over. "You gonna take my arm?" she dared him.

"I look like some kind of a gentleman to you?" he parried, offering it anyway, and they sauntered after the other two.

The four of them had to look unearthly, he thought, two vivid sets of twins strolling along. The Kanan-creature had put on a simple off-white frock, and she looked appallingly girl-next-door for someone who could blast the paint off a jeep just by deciding to. Those two next to each other looked like life, like apple blossoms and summer leaves. The sexy lady on his arm was wearing mostly black with golden butterflies, and the two of them together probably looked like flaming death.

"We could go hunting like this," she purred, pleased. "What'd'you think? Everybody's going to be looking at us anyway; we might as well."

"I like the way you think," he started to purr back.

She kept talking over him, though, cupping her free hand to her mouth and calling naughtily, "At us, Kanan!"

"Oh, certainly," the other girl called back politely, smiling back at her with an impertinant look that was so familiar it almost made Gojyo like her.

But, "Well, perhaps not," Hakkai said, turning to face them so the sun glinted off his monocle and turned his face, with its smile Gojyo had never seen before, into a mask. He didn't much care for its expression. "Of course, the sun is a glorious vision, but Chang E is easier on the eyes."

"Ooooh!" Gojyo's lady crowed, delightedly crowding in to his side as the Kanan-creature blushed at being called a moon princess. "Your friend's so gallant!"

"Yeah," he said dismissively, smiling through the sour taste in his mouth. "Hakkai's polite like that."

"The archer's tribute is too generous," the Kanan-thing said, still blushing.

"The humble woodcutter pauses to pour a dish of sake," Hakkai countered, "for the lady of the Cold Palace."

Her pale face brightened, and Gojyo had a moment's pleasure in thinking they were about to go get some alcohol before she recited, "'The frost I saw from the bed was really moonlight.'"

"'Beholding the moon I hang my head, homesick,'" Hakkai finished, looking pleased.

"Oh, Lord Heaven, two of them," Gojyo groaned. Even he knew a few versions of that story; the hero who shot down the extra suns, his lady wife who ate the immortality herb and rose to live on the moon, the woodcutter there who could never finish chopping down the immortal cassia tree, the hare who tried to pound the rest of the herb into a powder so humanity could attain immortality. The poem sounded familiar, too. He could tell they were about to springboard into a bewildering ocean of esoterica, though.

"This could get bad," his lady agreed grimly. "Sanzo never encourages her. I vote we ignore them."

"Okay by me," he said fervently. "I didn't catch your name?"

"I'm called--"

"Hang on. Hakkai!" he interrupted her.

"'Poor lady, her children don't think of Chang'An'--yes, Gojyo?"

"Sorry," he said. "He didn't catch your name either."

"I'm called Honshin," she said with what he suspected was more patience than accuracy. He knew his mother would never have given him a name like that, and the scars on her cheek told him it was definitely the same mother.

"He's called Hakkai," he said, being pointed and meaningful in two directions at once and hoping Hakkai was proud of him. "I'm Gojyo."

"I hope you'll call me Kanan, Gojyo-san," she said with a modesty he would have suspected of being a little sadistic if it had come from Hakkai.

What he wanted to say was, "Sure, 'cause I love watching your brother flinch just like that every time the K word comes up." Instead he bowed mockingly and teased, "Oh, I couldn't be so informal with the moon-princess, O-hime-chan."

Which had the effect not only of making everybody laugh and Hakkai relax but of relieving his feelings a little. For somebody caught as far off guard as everybody else by the day's events, he thought he wasn't doing too badly. Then again, Hakkai seemed to be taking it all fairly well, too, but he'd been around the world's best faker long enough learn a few of the tells. The real question was how many of them were in denial.

Ordinarily, Gojyo would move heaven and earth to get out of doing the shopping. It was one of the reasons Hakkai had come back from Sanzo's temple with his shiny new name and nearly died for real from his first good look at their kitchen. It wasn't so much that he didn't enjoy it, but it was a struggle not to buy things he didn't need from the prettier vendors.

He was against that wasteful kind of thing on principle, and under prolonged water torture might even have admitted it. For one thing, it was all right for other people to waste their sweaty wages to impress the ladies, but he'd always had better luck in that department while earning money than throwing it away.

The gold card could have changed that, but Hakkai had Formed A Habit by then, and anyone who wanted to change it would have been up against the Mildly Bewildered Smile of Spine-Freezing Doom. Hakkai liked his little rituals.

He wouldn't have missed this trip for the world, though. He'd thought Hakkai was a good bargainer on his own, but those two together were ruthless. After a false start with a fruit-seller where they'd gotten their wires crossed and had to go away empty-handed, they cut a sweet, merciless swathe through the marketplace. The tobacconist in particular never knew what had hit him.

Gojyo and Honshin just strolled along behind them and enjoyed the resulting cigarettes and carnage, the game of visibility forgotten. After a couple of stalls, they started to keep score.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: Ah, well, it's tiring to work alone in any case.

(whistles)

Goku: Eh? Huhuhwhat?

Hakkai: Ne, Goku, would you like me to make you some yakisoba?

Goku: O.O HAI!

Hakkai: Then do me the favor, please, of guarding that link from this gentleman.

Goku: Okay--WAAAAAAAI, TEN-CHAAAAAAAN! (glomp)

Hakkai: (sigh) Perhaps that was to be expected. =.=

[end part six]

Back to index

Chapter 7: Sanzo

The last meal of the day was supposed to be routine. Sanzo was very clear about that. It was meant to be a period of relaxation and freedom of extraneous thought, to fill the belly and clear the mind and make way for sleep. It was of course impossible to manage true relaxation around his tagalongs, but he could usually manage routine.

He'd even managed to get to the point where he could integrate their nonsense into his daily routine. Read the paper with a monkey sprawled out next to him, to the background of Hakkai puttering with the wok and the steamer and sometimes trying to hum on those days when the idiot felt it necessary to pretend he didn't care who the other idiot was out doing. Employ the Fishing Bear technique to acquire food before the nightly melee got started. Lever food into mouth with chopsticks while humoring Hakkai's latest doomed attempt to have an actual discussion like civilized people. Hone his rage over the squabbling imbeciles with no appreciation for either silence or cultured conversation. When finished eating, knock heads together and leave.

Dinner was sometimes instructive, often a grim endurance and, on glorious, infrequent occasions, blissfully quiet.

Two of the morons were making an unheard-of racket in the inn's kitchen, and the other four were plastered all around the doorframe with eight huge eyes. He wasn't displeased that no one was walking on eggshells anymore, although he didn't fool himself that it was a permanent state of comfort. The running commentary that Gojyo and his echo had going was, he had to admit, entertaining.

But it was a little unsettling to hear Hakkai raise his voice.

"Forgive me, Cho-san, but the mushrooms should not be soaked for longer than an hour."

"But Cho-san, the stalks will still be hard."

"Yes, and so one removes them."

"It isn't necessary. We can leave them for longer and--Gonou! You've chopped the meat too fine!"

"Sanzo prefers a filling to be a paste; we can make a stew tomorrow, if you like." This was Dogmatic Voice, cross pedantry hovering on the edge of danger. Over fucking dumplings. Hakkai was so far off his game the only reason Sanzo could think of for Gojyo to have left him alone with her was for the purpose of keeping out of the crossfire. "And in any case, the stalks have a woody flavor, and the texture is coarse. Baozi should be more delicate."

"They aren't jiaozi; it isn't a rice paste. The dough will overpower the filling if you do it that way."

"Certainly it will, if that's all the ginger you plan to--Kanan! What are you doing to those prawns?"

"Do you want me to put them in the soup with their shells on?"

"I don't want you to make soup with them at all! We agreed to make them coral-and-jade, with the two-color chili."

"Yes, but we have too many."

"Too many for eight people? Two of whom are Goku?"

"Her name is Kaikara, Gonou, and there's the question of time constraints! How late do you think she'll wait to eat?"

"It isn't necessary to coat each individual prawn one by one, Kanan!"

"Of course it isn't, but I have small hands!"

Silence.

"Of course," Hakkai said after a moment, collected and friendly again. "In fact, Cho-san, I prefer a vigorous marinade than to impress the powder on directly. The flavor becomes more infused than obtrusive, and since time is a consideration..."

After the unrestrained exasperation, his usual gentle, restrained tone sounded choked. It hurt to hear.

"Gin," Sanzo's reflection said coolly.

"Don't bother," he said without heat, putting his cards down. She shrugged and did the same, abandoning the pretense of not listening.

"Sanzo," Goku asked, wide-eyed, "Is food really that complicated?"

"Nope," Gojyo said, grinning.

Two courteous voices twined out of the kitchen. "In that case, Gojyo(-san), perhaps you would care to join us?"

"Not a chance," he called back cheerfully, raising his hands protectively with a backing-off face. "You two go ahead and kill each other, I'm staying out of it."

There was another, awful silence from the kitchen, but Gojyo looked lazily, sharply unrepentant.

Dumbass kappa, Sanzo groaned silently, what's he playing at? He looked into the chilly lavender eyes across the table from him. She had an evaluating eyebrow up. The hell with her. "Hakkai," he said, loudly but levelly, and enjoyed the way eight wary eyes turned to him. "If you're butchering in there, bring the wok out and we'll have a hot pot."

The silence turned incredulous, and then someone in the kitchen started to giggle. "Oh, no, Sanzo-san," she laughed, "I think I would prefer to be cooked in clay."

"Cho-san!" Hakkai admonished her cheerfully, with barely any tremour beneath it at all. "Are you a fish or a grouse?"

"Yeah, Kanan," Gojyo's echo leered. "That's no way for a woman to be eaten. Hey, Sanzo, maybe the blond dude's really a real monk!"

Two paper fans hit her right between the eyes, one after another, and boomeranged back to their owners. "Shut up," the reflection said, her voice weary with the enforced tolerance of long exposure.

"Yeah, slutroach," the she-monkey complained. "Virgin ears down here."

"Suuuuure they are, chibi-chibi," the woman clucked, ruffling the girl's brown hair.

"Who's a chibi, you water-lummox?!" the girl howled, and went at her.

"Take it outside, please," one of the cooks said firmly, and they obligingly angled off towards the door.

Goku had moved away from the door and draped himself over Sanzo's shoulder. He was jittering uneasily. "Sanzo? Hey, I said, Sanzo!"

"If you're going to ask the stupid question I know you're going to ask, don't waste my time," he warned.

"But Sanzo, can you really eat a woman?"

"Shut up!" he yelled at Gojyo, who had hurled himself down against the wall to howl with laughter, and threw the fan at him. "Bakasaru," he complained. "What do you think?"

"Well, that scorpion-youkai said she ate a Sanzo once, so maybe, but I don't think a person would taste very good."

This set Gojyo off again.

"DO YOU HAVE A DEATH WISH?" Sanzo bawled, and when that didn't work he shot the wall between the kappa's two cowlicks or antennae or whatever they hell they were.

"Sanzo!" Hakkai said sharply, appearing in the doorway. He had flour all over his arms and on his nose and cheek and in his hair, and he looked harassed. "Not at this wall, if you don't mind."

He'd never minded shots in his direction before. Sanzo hoped, without expecting much, that he'd get this protective nonsense worked out of his system soon. Very soon.

"Goku," Hakkai went on, "no one is cooking anyone. Will you and Gojyo please go and find us some more wood? And perhaps you would tell Hirahara-san," he added, still to Goku but giving Sanzo a meaningful look, "that we may need four extra place settings."

"Expecting company, 'Kai?" Gojyo drawled, peeling himself up off the floor agreeably.

"We'll see," Sanzo answered noncommittally.

Kanan frowned, and gave her brother one of the Explain That Now If You Want To Live looks that Sanzo had thought he himself had a patent out on. She did give it a more polite spin than he usually bothered with. "Why would we need more?"

"Because Goku has been outside this door until just now," Hakkai explained, "and Kaikara-chan as well."

Kanan and Honshin looked as mystified by this as the blonde across from him was refusing to. "Would this be," Kanan asked politely, "the kind of company that steals strips of pork and pieces of mushroom and entire prawns? I thought you were eating them."

The monocle flashed gold in the light from the window, but Hakkai didn't speak. It was a real pleasure, Sanzo thought with serene vindictiveness, to see him on both ends of that pleasant Who Me Irked look.

"Four places, Hakkai?" Goku asked excitedly. "Sanzo, can we play with them after dinner?"

"Don't be so eager, monkey," Sanzo growled.

"Yes, Goku," Hakkai agreed. "I think most of us have had enough playtime for one day. Don't you think so, Sanzo?"

"You use a lot of air," Sanzo drawled, "on what goes without saying."

"Care to fill us in?" the blonde asked irritably.

"Ch," he snorted, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. "Figure it out yourself."

"And in order to encourage these thieves to become our guests," Kanan pressed, "you decided to very sweetly save them trouble by throwing perfectly good food out the window?"

"I preferred to make the selection myself, yes," he smiled back implacably.

"You're just trying to steal Sanzo's girlfriend," Gojyo smirked.

"Shut up," Sanzo sighed wearily. The blonde had both eyebrows up at him now. Terrific.

"Yes, Gojyo," Hakkai said slyly, "I must say, not everyone has your fondness for, er, younger women."

"Che!" Gojyo exclaimed, throwing his hands up. "Isn't anybody going to let me forget that ever?"

"No," the other men chorused flatly, making Honshin snicker. "In your dreams, lolikappa," Goku added, grinning nastily.

Gojyo shot the other redhead an irritated look, and complained, "It's not like I even did anything! Just because hollow-legs here has a filthy mind for such a tiny little monkey..."

"Who's got a filthy mind?" Goku choked.

"Wood, Gojyo," Hakkai reminded him firmly.

"Anytime for you, babe," Gojyo shot back, and was met by a dead silence. Catching up with himself, he choked.

It had sounded so automatic, though, that Sanzo decided to be merciful and stop at a Look. He wasn't alone in it, though.

"Am I meant to ask you, Gojyo, I wonder," Hakkai mused aloud in his sweetest Someone Will Die Momentarily voice, "whether you meant to say that out loud, or--"

"Autopilot," Gojyo blurted hastily. "No offense, O-hime-chan. Not trying to steal your m--eh. Ah... hah. Iya. I mean, just a reflex, yaknow? So! Firewood and place settings, right? Come on, gakisaru."

"I'm not an ape!"

"Oh, so you admit you're a brat, then?"

"Listen, ecchiyarou..."

And they were gone.

"Ch'," the blonde huffed disdainfully. "And they say women talk too much."

"Ah, well, Sanzo-san," Hakkai said cheerfully, although he was still glaring daggers at the door, as he had been since that 'steal your man' gaffe and it's attendant stammers. Sanzo had to admire the way he managed to differentiate between the two priests and still weasel out of pissing anyone off by being too respectful. "'They' can be misleading at times, it seems," he finished on his way back into the kitchen.

"Was your real brother that impossible?" she asked Kanan, glaring after him.

"Oh, no," the girl said, clasping her hands together in some distress. It was just a good thing Gojyo had left already, Sanzo thought, smirking deadpan, or he would have been hitting on her out of sheer 'automatic reflex.' "Gonou was really very sweet, he--"

CRASH.

"Sumimasen!" Kanan gasped, and spun back into the kitchen.

The conversation that followed went, as Sanzo heard it, like this.

"YA-HO!"

"Gonou, who on earth--"

"Hey, there's two of you! Are you one of Sanzo's guys, too?"

"Ara... I suppose you could say that, yes--"

"Then Lilin-chan will kill you both!"

CRASH BANG THUD

"Oh, dear--ne, Lilin-chan, don't bump into the stove please."

THUMP

"Ow!"

"My apologies, Lilin-chan, but I did warn you..."

Sanzo rose with dignity and moved to the kitchen before anyone could catch him smirking. Inside, Hakkai looked up with surprise from the wok. "Is something the matter, Sanzo?"

"You tell me," he retorted, looking down at the catfight on the floor.

"Ah," Hakkai said in his I Will Not Laugh voice. "Miss Lilin seemed to think that the rice stick would make a good club to brain me with. Cho-san objected. I must admit to having some objections myself; it's quite a well-made rice stick."

"She's a little undignified for a you," he commented neutrally, meaning Kanan and ignoring Hakkai's little joke. The woman spared a moment from the scuffle to shoot him a cold look. She nearly got kicked in the chest before bringing her attention back where it belonged.

"I admire people who are able to move without breaking," Hakkai said mildly.

Sanzo hated it when he did that, when he cracked one of those self-deprecating compliments that was aimed right at Sanzo. Ordinary insults were irritating enough, but you couldn't argue with a bank shot. But at least it meant Hakkai had stopped panicking for the moment, which was a relief. Hakkai got high-strung and difficult to manage when he was panicky.

Ordinary snippiness could be tolerated, so Sanzo just said, "Any sign of the others?"

"Not yet," Hakkai said. "Lilin-chan, does your brother know that you came to visit?"

"Hn-nh," she grunted cheerfully, shaking her copper head with a silvery jangle of bells from her ponytail holder. Then her feet were coming at Sanzo's head very fast, because Kanan had flipped her. He stepped out of the way before realizing she was headed for the steamer, and stretched out a hand to interrupt her trajectory. Hakkai was there in the next moment with a cup of tea, spinning her into a stool with his free hand. She looked at the tea and, in a voice so perky it made Sanzo's head throb, demanded, "Did you poison it?"

Picking herself up, Kanan looked ready to pitch a cold fit at the insult to her brother. Hakkai only smiled, though, and said gently, "Do I remind you of Yaone-dono, Lilin-chan? How flattering! But we don't fight in the same style."

"Oh," she said, sounding disappointed, and then, "I receive your sacrifice!" to the tea, and drank it.

Hakkai refilled her cup and draped himself over the counter next to her. He exchanged a look with his sister that cooled her down and sent her to the sink to do vicious and arcane things to a head of cabbage. "Tell me, Lilin-chan, do you really think it's kind of you to run away from your oniisan all the time? He must be very concerned."

"Oniichan always worries about everything," she said dismissively, swinging her ankles. "And Lilin-chan doesn't run away! I came to defeat you Sanzo-guys, 'cause I'm stronger than him."

"Nobody's defeating anybody today," Sanzo said flatly.

"Certainly not," Hakkai backed him up. "Speaking for my friends and I, Lilin-chan, we've had enough fighting for one day, and I think your oniisan has as well. If you would like to go play with Goku and his friend Kaikara-chan, please go outside first and we'll call you in time to wash up before dinner. Would that be all right?"

"Can I defeat her?" she asked brightly, pointing at Kanan. "She's strong!"

"No, I don't think so," Hakkai said with painstakingly diplomatic vagueness. "She and I are cooking together."

Lilin considered this. "Cooking for dinner?" she asked. "For dinner for Lilin-chan?"

"You're certainly welcome to join us," Hakkai smiled, ignoring the evil-eye his sister was shooting him out of her own placid countenance.

"However, you'll have to behave," Sanzo said sharply. "Refer to yourself in the third-person again and I'll shoot you."

"Sanzo!" Hakkai said, just as sharply, as Kanan collapsed in giggles.

"Fine," he grumbled. Hakkai did have a point; someone would come after her no matter how well he hid the body. "Just the ponytail, then."

Hakkai rolled his eyes and ignored them both. "Of course, your brother and his friends are also welcome."

"And they, too, will get shot if they get cute," he added, mostly to see if he could make Kanan turn blue. It was probably exhaustion. Mostly. That bitch in the other room also had his back up.

"Waiiiiiii!" Lilin squealed, not to Sanzo. "I'll go tell him!"

"Why bother?" he sighed. "He'll show up."

"Most likely," Hakkai agreed sympathetically, every contained line of his nonexpression sniggering how very sorry it was that the world existed to inconvenience Sanzo. "You may as well wait here, Lilin-chan."

"Only not just here, Gonou," Kanan said pleasantly, venomous with alarm. She recovered fast, which was not a surprise.

"No," Sanzo agreed. He picked Lilin up by the scruff of her neck and the back of her pants, walked out of the kitchen, ejected her from the inn without passion, and sat back down at the table with the others. He no longer cared whether Hakkai was shaky, deliberately annoying people to relieve his feelings, or being his usual slinking, weasely self for some obscure purpose Sanzo would already have known about if he hadn't been busy paying attention to other people. Either way, dinner was going to be an unpleasant affair. He wasn't going to be able to digest anything.

It wasn't that the missed Chang'An, or the temple. He certainly didn't miss those priggish lip-service monks with the sticks up their asses who'd rather sniff disdainfully at a little boy's rowdy behavior than just tell him what wasn't acceptable in language he could understand. He did though, just sometimes, regret leaving behind a cook who not only understood his stomach but was also afraid of him, and who would never have dreamed of giving him chili instead of milk in the middle of a crisis.

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: Goku, you're looking very well! You've grown up a lot, and you barely look starved at all anymore. Konzen must be taking very good care of you.

Goku: But I'm hungry aaaaaall the tiiiiiime, Ten-chan! In fact, I'm hungry right now. Hakkai, haraheta!

Hakkai: Well, I did offer you that yakisoba, Goku, but I suppose it would be impolite to make you fight your friend for it. --.--

Goku: (blinks) Huh? But don't we fight Kougaiji and Yaone and Lilin and that erokappa's brother all the time? Aren't they our friends?

Hakkai: Ano... something like that...

Goku: So there's no problem! Come on, Ten-chan, let's fight, and then Hakkai will make us yakisoba!

Tenpou: o.O

[end part 7]

Back to index

Chapter 8: Honshin

Kanan had poked her head out to tell everyone how long dinner was going to take, so the exiled started a poker game. The premise was that the snippy comments from the kitchen about being left out would be less pointed about cards than a useful planning session. Given what the comments were already, no one wanted to provoke them into getting worse.

Besides, the Gojyo-man had said he wanted to see what would happen when either two or none of the players were guaranteed to win. He hadn't explained that, and she and Sanzo had cautiously decided not to ask.

The beast cheated right, left, and center until Honshin decided she'd seen enough and called him on it.

"Well, yeah," he shrugged, unperturbed. "Man's gotta keep in practice somehow, and I make a living offa this. How'd I give it away?"

"You didn't," she smirked, bold as brass the way the playboys liked it, and handed him back his bandana.

He only gaped comically at her for a second before grinning right back, delighted. "Too bad we have to send you home, sister. You and me could clean up, especially with those two to help." He raised his voice. "How about it, O-hime-chan? Wanna help us bilk the masses?"

"No, thank you, Gojyo-san," Kanan called back politely. "I'm not very good at Honshin's games--Gonou, I need that!"

"It will suit the dish better if you add it after the broth has boiled."

"I thought you said you wanted a smooth texture."

"For the jiaozi, yes, but in this case..."

Meanwhile, the cards Gojyo was shuffling had exploded all over the table. Paying no attention to his fumble, he gawked at Honshin. She raised an eyebrow back; she wasn't picking them up. Their Sanzo was staring, too, more discretely.

"Scuse me," the other redhead said hastily. He shoved his chair back and darted into the kitchen, almost tripping over his own feet on the way.

"I'm not that graceless, am I?" Honshin asked Sanzo, who favored her with a reassuringly dour I'm Not Here To Flatter Your Vanity look and didn't answer.

Gojyo was back before Honshin even had time to be relieved, dragging an unresisting Hakkai by the elbows. Honshin couldn't imagine anyone glomming Kanan like that and surviving, but the green man seemed quite pleased about it. He leaned back into the Gojyo-creature's hands as though they were the only thing holding him upright, and his expression was one Honshin had never seen on a man, a kind of delicately pained amusement that looked a hell of a lot like Flirty Virgin to her.

"Heeei, Hakkai," the Gojyo-thing breathed into those frivolous earcuffs, "are we sure about these chicks?"

"What do you mean, Gojyo?" the Hakkai-man returned in more normal tones, with no regard for whatever secrecy his friend was trying for.

Not that he had what she'd call a normal voice. Kanan's voice was a harp, silky and jarring and sharp on the staccatos. She could make the most inane things sound dangerous even to someone who'd known her for years, and half the time it was just habit. She was worse than Sanzo that way--Sanzo also sounded like she was biting back fury half the time, but she always meant it. With Kanan you had to pay attention. This guy, though, was a glass harmonica, all velvety ripples and sexy spine-tingling vibrations that could leave you bleeding out the ears with no notice at all.

"Didn't you hear O-hime-chan say she can't play cards? I bet she can't drink worth a damn, either."

Honshin grinned nastily. "Wanna bet? Hey, Kanan!"

"Shut up," Sanzo said wearily, eyeing Hakkai with a neutral cast in her eye that spoke approving volumes. "There isn't enough sake under Heaven."

The lovely man chuckled nervously, still looking pained. "I'm afraid that might be true," he admitted. "Gojyo, Cho-san wouldn't have learned to play cards when I did; I don't think the girls in the orphanage had much interest."

"You said it was a knack," he accused, scowling horribly. Rowr. With thicker eyebrows or a heavier jaw he would have looked like a thug, but as it was...

It was nice to know she would have made such a handsome man, but there was no point in trying to do anything about it. Kanan's echo seemed a little conflicted--fair enough; so did Kanan--but her own was pulling an 'it's platonic really but damn if I can keep my hands off you' act that would have been wholly pathetic if he hadn't had such a relaxed, unselfconscious air about him. Or if his target hadn't greeted it with such complete equanimity. As it was, Honshin, unusually, didn't feel the need to box both their ears and show them how it was done. All it made her feel was a serious yen for her man.

"Admit it," Gojyo said, continuing to scowl. "You're just an ordinary shark."

"But I only play for money when there's no other choice," he pointed out equitably, just making a point, and glanced back at the kitchen. "Gojyo, I really should get back..."

"Forget it," Honshin waved at him. "She hates people trying to help anyway."

The thin lips pressed together worriedly. "That's what I'm afraid of, Honshin-san."

Honshin had to press her lips together hard not to laugh at him. The world was going to be different on the road than in the smoky circle of bars that had been her life until Kanan, of course, but she wasn't used to men cooking at all, except for carelessly dumping cans of things into a pot when they had to. Sometimes they rememebered to open the can first.

"Sharks are only occasionally rapacious," the man-priest droned out a little irritably, as though he'd wanted to say it earlier. "They're only hungry every week or so." As a statement it lacked something, Honshin thought, but Hakkai was sending him an amused, betrayed look. Gojyo's jaw dropped, too, and a stunned, bemiracled bemusement at support from the monk crept over his face.

"Brr," Honshin shivered, curling over at Sanzo's elbow. "I can't stand it--too creepy. They look like us. Make 'em stop, Sanzo."

"Don't you think it's sexy?" Sanzo drawled in a voice that made it clear that she herself was to remain unimplicated in Honshin's dreary lust-fests.

"Hell, yeah," she enthused, bouncing upright with a flair that drew every male eye in the room, although the green ones politely averted themselves almost as quickly as the purple ones disdainfully flicked away. "Tell you what, though, it makes me miss my man."

"Your man?" the Gojyo-creature asked, his gruesomely familiar eyes jerking up to her face with such a tinge of big-brotherly horror that she nearly laughed at him, too.

"Singular?" the man-priest put in, but since the jab was so clearly aimed at her echo, she ignored it.

Anyway, the green man was silently scolding his priest with a quizzical eyebrow already. He turned back to her and courteously asked, "Is it permitted to enquire?"

She was opening her mouth to answer when the door got kicked in from outside. The men turned as one to, on a scale that went from scold to bellow, utter variants on 'Lilin' before stopping short and staring.

"JIEN!" Honshin squealed, and tackled him.

She had him flat on his back and was tonguing his tonsils before she realized he wasn't kissing back. He was, in fact, lying there like a lump in a labcoat. Pulling back, she demanded, "The hell's the matter with you?"

Behind her, three voices faintly oh-deared. She recognized two of them.

Appalled, Jien choked, "What did that bastard Homura do to you?"

She sat back on his strong stomach and grinned down at him cockily. "Got his pansy kami ass kicked, for starters."

"My entrance," the skinny guy next to them mourned in a quiet monotone. His legs were skinny, anyway. He looked vaguely familiar, but Honshin couldn't place him. "Doku, focus."

"Uh--yeah, Kou, just--um--Gojyo, get off."

"Guhwho?" she repeated blankly, not moving, then blinked. "Oh! You're their Jien."

"Whose Jien?" the man named Kou--another redhead, but full youkai--asked blankly.

"Who's Jien?" Jien asked in his 'if you don't stop pretending you don't know better than this your ass is ragweed' voice.

"She must have mistaken you for someone else," Gojyo said helpfully, hauling her up by the collar, and pulling--well, his brother, she supposed, and not hers--up with the other hand.

"Gojyo," Jien said, relieved, and then, "Gojyo?!!"

"Get off, you bully!" she said indignantly, attached herself to Jien, and scowled at him.

"Oi, oi," he protested, peeling her away again. "There's a limit to fraternizing with the enemy, you know..."

"I'll fraternize with my brother all I want," she said and, winning a moral struggle with the Kanan in her head, stuck her tongue at him.

"Gojyo," Jien said again, weakly, looking from one to the other. "Yaone, was that morphine you gave me?"

"No," the purple-haired chick said. "There really are two of him."

"Watch who you're calling a him, sister," Honshin said, affronted. "Just because some of us don't need chains to keep our bras up..."

"Baby, you curve like the Yangtse," Gojyo said comfortingly, and poked her ribs to make her squirm. "See?"

"Well, that's Gojyo," Jien affirmed, looking perplexed, and chain-girl giggled like a lady behind her hand.

"And this is Honshin-san," Hakkai said helpfully, holding out a chair for her in a very definite manner, "and Dokugakuji-san and Yaone-san and--"

"Kougaiji," Sanzo finished for him sourly, and Honshin blinked. How did she know skinny-legs? "Don't introduce me to someone I already killed, Cho."

"Oh!" Honshin exclaimed, smacking her fist into her hand. "That youkai dude with the fire thingy and all the minions. I remember." The dude's eyebrow twitched. "Hey, Jien, how come you guys haven't nailed him yet?"

Jien sputtered.

"Dokugakuji is my man," Skinny-legs said, a hint of anger breaking through the monotone and his confusion at being told he was dead. Or maybe it was about being called a dude. Honshin thought he might have been somebody's son.

"Oh, so you nail him?" she grinned. "And bondage-chickie here is your woman?"

"Yaone is my alchemist!" the youkai glared, flushing, but the Yaone-chick only looked a little wistful.

"Sanzo?" Hakkai said brightly, and a little hastily. "Either one of you. Might I borrow your harisen for a moment?" The priests exchanged a look, and in the end it was Sanzo who handed over her fan. "Thank you, Sanzo-san," he said. "Gojyo, perhaps you would care to do the honors?"

"Oh, sure," Gojyo grinned, and took it. Still grinning, he whomped Honshin over the head with it, and amiably suggested, "Zip it."

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: Goku, I think Konzen might be a bad influence on you.

Goku: Huh?

Tenpou: Never mind. Very well, if you wish to fight, I hope you don't mind if I don't hold back.

Goku: Oh, sure! It wouldn't be any fun if you did!

Back to index

Chapter 9: Goku

Sanzo was acting weird. He might even have gone so far as to say super-ultra-mega weird, except that Hakkai didn't like it when he talked with his mouth full. Or something. He laughed when Goku did that, but it was a laugh with a headache. Hakkai was acting weird, too, but Hakkai had an excuse. Everybody knew about Hakkai.

But he couldn't figure out why Sanzo was so rattled. Maybe there were two of him, but it was another one of him, not an imposter, so what was the problem? Sanzo was Sanzo, and if another Sanzo showed up, he was still Sanzo. Goku would have known if he weren't.

He'd asked Gojyo about it and Gojyo had said it was good for Sanzo to see what he looked like to other people. But that didn't make sense, because Sanzo was bright and strong, and why would seeing that make him jumpy?

So he'd asked Hakkai, but Hakkai had just hidden his mouth and turned away so if Sanzo saw his shoulders shaking at least he would know Hakkai wasn't laughing at him on purpose to piss him off.

But even if Sanzo was being hyper-mega-beyond weird and trying to act like--well, it was like he was trying to act like Hakkai, only he was doing it like Gojyo would do it, only badly in a pissy kind of way because no matter how hard he was trying, Sanzo could never get away from being Sanzo because he was Sanzo, and--

"Oi, saru," Gojyo drolled out. "You sick or something?"

"Huh?" he blinked, and looked down at his plate automatically.

It was EMPTY!!!!!!

"Hey!" he yelled, looking wildly around. The girl who smelled like nothing at all whatsoever looked as shocked as he felt, and her plate was empty, too. The enemy-brat that Sanzo was way too nice to was happily digging her fangs into--

"My buns!" he and no-scent howled as one, and lunged at the Enemy as the kappa girl who was just as sick as Gojyo threw back her head and howled. They would have gotten her, too, except that Sanzo smacked him in the face with his fan and her with her chopsticks.

"No fair, Sanzo!" they said indignantly, and pointed at the Enemy accusingly. "She stole them!"

"That's what you get for not paying attention," the Enemy said, sticking out her tongue.

"Lilin," Goku's sparring partner groaned. And that was it. What was that supposed to do? No wonder the Enemy was spoiled!

"If you can't teach your sister manners, dead man," Sanzo--not Goku's Sanzo, the other one--droned.

"Ahaha," Hakkai cut her off, looking alarmed. "Now, now, there's no need for fighting over dinner, Sanzo-san, is there? If Lilin-chan and Goku and Kaikara-san would rather play than help us think of a way to return your party, I'm sure we could take a moment to set up a small amount of food on a blanket for them outside. They can have a nice little picnic," he said pointedly coming down hard on the littles.

"Oh, a children's table! What a good idea!" the Kanan lady agreed, grinding the salt in hard.

Goku and no-scent slumped back into their chairs and the Enemy scowled. Hakkai really wasn't fair sometimes.

"But Hakkai-dono," Yaone said earnestly, after a grateful smile for the subduers of her charge, "I still don't know how you knew to expect us."

"Oh, well, as to that, Yaone-san," Hakkai smiled back at her with his bashful talking-to-Yaone face, making the lady's green eyes narrow. "With no offense to you, Kougaiji-san, it seemed unlikely that--that is to say, after today's events, I would have been most disappointed in Yaone-san's abilities as an apothecary if she had permitted... Er, well, perhaps not her abilities, but it would in any case have been most inadvisable--"

"Goku didn't leave you in any shape to teleport," Sanzo said bluntly.

"Or fly. No reflection on you," Gojyo said easily, reaching over to ruffle Goku's hair over his new limiter. "Going up against the howling hell-monkey's like trying to fight a volcano in a cyclone."

Goku glared. It hadn't been his fault he'd lost his limiter. This time. "Just 'cause you can't take me, you stupid sea-cucumber..."

"In any case," Hakkai said firmly, fending off a speculating look from Honshin that came out of nowhere, as far as Goku could see, and turned Hakkai faintly pink, "since you were in the area, given Lilin-chan's inexhastable energies--"

"And since Hakkai was cooking," Gojyo smirked. Actually, Goku felt sorry for the Enemy--about food, anyway. It wasn't just that she didn't have Hakkai to cook for her. He'd heard her ask Hakkai if the tea was poisoned. It must be awful not to know if the food you were going to eat was going to be your enemy.

"--I thought she might show up. And of course we knew you'd come after her in that case."

"This," Kougaiji said stonily, turning to glare down at the Enemy, "is why I ask y ou not to run off. Not only our honorable enemies know I'll follow."

Goku felt even sorrier for her, now. Sanzo would never have insulted him like that. Sanzo knew he could take care of himself. Not that Sanzo wouldn't follow, of course, but it would only be to smack him one for slowing the journey down.

Omake!

The SEME at the End of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: Well, perhaps Goku is a bit distractible. I have another idea.

Tenpou: Oh?

Hakkai: Jiipu, would you be so good as to guard this link and stop it from being clicked, please?

Jiipu: Kyuuu!

Hakkai: Thank you, my frien--

Tenpou: GOUJUN???!

Goujun: Marshal, you have an annoying habit of addressing your superiors--- o.O ????! [Is that... me?!]

Jiipu: KYUU???! [Is that... me?!]

(Goujun has heart attack from shock)

(From Goujun's body, a small white dragon rises)

Jiipu: Kyukyu. [You have -got- to be kidding.]

Hakuryuu-chan: K'kyu. [I agree entirely.]

(Hakuryuu-chan disappears in a puff of paradox and emerges at some point during RELOAD.)

Jiipu: (sweatdrops)

Hakkai: A--anou...

Kanzeon Bosatsu: So that's what happened to him! ^_^

[end part 9]

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Chapter 10: Kanan

Notes: I hate my hormones. In fact, I hate your hormones. In fact, estrogen in general is really pissing me off today. I intended to make a disclaimer here about how Kanan’s opinions are not my opinions. Which they really aren’t; I kinda like Yaone, for one thing. But instead of apologizing for her, I’m going to cheer her on. She’s been through her own very special kind of Rough Stuff, and if she came out thirty percent catty and sixty percent bitch, (switch that around and you’ve got Hakkai) I figure she’s entitled.

"Tonight, I believe, we may be allies," Gonou smiled blandly. Kanan was getting very tired of that expression. Not to mention the way everyone was letting him get away with it.

She remembered meeting him again for the first time. After a dizzying morning tight-roping the transfer to a new orphanage, the brittle, bitter construct of her bright spirits unhinging itself, falling to numb disbelief against the slack-jawed, round-eyed mirror in the back row. That wistful smile, never quite believing itself, heaven's brief answer to her outrage. Almost the same face now, almost the same smile, her dharma and nirvana turned shield and sly dagger under his shadowed, distant eyes.

The youkai prince barked, "We're under truce tonight, Cho Hakkai. Don't mistake it for an alliance."

Poor Sanzo. Kanan could feel her getting more irritated every time the prince spoke. Sanzo was firmly of the opinion--as to whether or not sour grapes were behind it, Kanan wouldn't speculate--that the dead should stay dead.

Kanan agreed. She would have been much happier without the coward Yaone, herself.

That had been a most satisfying day. It had started with Honshin, Kaikara and Jien teaching manners to some extremely rude youkai men with limiters, which had been a pleasant exercise for them. When the mouse of a waitress to whose benefit they'd been enjoying themselves had turned out to be not only a youkai and a poisoner but a breathless, spineless damsel ready to give up everything, her life, after one failure... well. Kanan had been more than happy to help her out with that while Sanzo sutraed and shot the pompous hero who'd answered the assassin's distress. Then they'd found out whose son Short Dark and Humorless was.

It had been a most satisfying day, and Kanan couldn't for the life of her understand why the men had deprived themselves of it's simple pleasures.

"If you'll permit me to continue, Kougaiji-san," Gonou said with razor politeness, "we do have a common purpose. For the moment."

"You just haven't caught on yet 'cause saru slapped you silly," Gojyo said helpfully, grinning and lounging, "Not 'Kai's fault."

"Shut it, shrimp," Jien told him, mostly amiably.

"Ooh," Gojyo jeered, grinning back and glowing a little behind his casual snideness. "Pay attention, chimp. If you eat aaaall your vegetables and exercise reeeeeeeeal hard, you could grow up into a big ol' baboon like this guy."

"Silverback," Jien corrected him placidly. His prince raised an aristocratic eyebrow, and the assassin also shot him a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. Kanan had to dimple a little herself. Jien was a wonderful friend and very dependable, but he was never going to be anyone's idea of an alpha male.

"I'm not a--why didn't you, then?" Goku started indignantly and ended curiously.

Everyone except the other children and the prince chimed, "Cigarettes."

"Is that why you're so short, Sanzo?" the children asked (Lilin used a ruder title), and then glared at each other. "I'm never smoking!" Kaikara added virtuously.

"Me either," Goku nodded.

"Am I expected to clap?" Sanzo drawled at the same time that the blond man exhaled impatiently and Kanan and Gonou chorused, "Neither."

"I'm afraid it may be too late, in any case, Goku," Gonou said after shifting his amused smile (at last, a real expression!) from Kanan to his young friend. "Second-hand smoke is just as bad."

"You chimney-faced kappa, you stunted my growth! Give it back!" Goku demanded, hurling his empty teacup at Gojyo while Kaikara cast a tempted look at Sanzo.

"Why don't you blame Sanzo?!" Gojyo protested indignantly, dodging. "He's, like, three chimneys!"

"Children's table!" Kanan sang out. "Four places can be arranged just as easily!" Gonou sent her a warm, appreciative look, and she could have sworn she heard no less than three growls.

Sanzo put her gun away as they settled down, and nodded curt thanks at Kanan for sparing her the bullet. After a moment, more grudgingly, the other priest followed suit.

"Your man mentioned a common purpose," the prince said stiffly to the man Sanzo, who grunted unenthusiastically.

"Did you mean getting us home, Gonou?" Kanan asked, meaning, It had better have been.

"That's exactly what Hakkai meant," Gojyo said, glaring at her.

The prince narrowed his eyes suspiciously down his long nose and observed, "Your presence here is none of our doing."

"Of course that's true," Kanan smiled warmly at him, kicking Honshin under the table when the kappa started inching away in alarm. "And neither is yours ours."

"Dead man," Sanzo added, like a name, as though Kanan had failed in politeness by not addressing him properly.

"And neither is your lady mother any of our concern," Kanan went on, kicking Sanzo's ankle this time. Surely a youkai prince wouldn't be so immune to subtlety. Kanan was certain he would have taken her meaning without Sanzo bludgeoning him over the head just to make sure. "But your royal father, I'm afraid, would be if we were to stay."

"Jadeface is a menace," Honshin agreed. The other Jeep's passengers looked at her sharply, and paid close attention. Perhaps they hadn't had the pleasure of the Empress's direct attention yet. "And that pervert she calls an underling is worse, and while you're her pawn you're our ow!"

"Kaikara?" Kanan asked sweetly. "Refresh Honshin-nee-chan's memory, please. What was our agreement about negotiating with courtiers?"

"Shut up and let you do the talking," Kaikara recited, with a superior smirk for Honshin. Gonou's party exchanged an amused glance.

"And why was that?"

"Cause they get insulted when you don't talk in riddles."

"Good monkey," Sanzo drawled, tossing her a pickle.

The girl's face lit up. "Thanks, Sanzo!"

"Hey, Sanzo, can I have a pickle?" Goku asked eagerly.

"Ask your keeper," the blond droned. For someone with such excellent posture, he exuded a lot of slouch.

The boy looked stymied and resentful for a second, but then he shrugged. "Can I, Hakkai?"

"Well, I suppose it's only fair," Gonou said cheerfully. "But if it's really fair, I think you should earn it, don't you? Tell me, when we have guests to dinner, what's our job?"

The boy sighed, and grudged, "Fine, then can Lilin-kun have one, too?"

"Lilin-chan!" the little youkai corrected him--loudly and as one who had been insulted, and yet somehow still perkily. Kanan rather envied her energy. The world became quick and air thin for her only in battle.

Goku's batter-colored eyes widened in exasperation, as though he'd been trying to do her a favor, and he opened his mouth.

Gonou deftly tossed a pickle into it, and passed the bowl down the table to the young princess while he was munching. "I don't see why not," he said firmly. "In any case, Kougaiji-san, as I said, I think we may be allies in this. As the ladies are far more likely to be our allies than yours in the long term, should they remain here. Are we agreed?"

"Perhaps," the prince sighed, rubbing between his eyebrows in defeat.

"See, Kanan?" Honshin said lazily, stretching out onto Jien's shoulder and hooking her chin over it. "Straight talk does it, too."

"Oh, is that what that was?" the big youkai asked, very quietly, with Jien's own yellow-feathered grin on his face, and the two of them started snickering at Gonou, who shot them a thin smile which was barely tolerant, not at all impressed, and almost worthy of Sanzo. Gojyo's face was frozen a careful blank.

"Then," Gonou said, turning back to the prince and pointedly ignoring the irreverent Shas, "the only question is how."

The assassin was looking at him out of large, sympathetic, burgundy eyes. Kanan had an urge to place herself between her brother and both the assassin and Gojyo and hiss, 'My man,' but first, she wasn't Honshin, second, Sanzo would almost certainly take it badly, and in any case Gojyo and Yaone were on different sides of him.

"How did you get here, Cho-dono?" Yaone asked her with warm concern. Kanan wondered whether she would have been so friendly if she'd known that Kanan had bored a qi-blast right through her brain, leaving a welling red hole like a chakra in the breath before she shattered into dust.

"Homura," the man Sanzo said briefly, possibly feeling that she would have taken too long to explain. "They came though the hole he made."

"I can summon a creature from the demon realm," Kougaiji said, as though someone had already asked him to do something impossible, "but it returns on it's own."

"Actually, our good buddy here already knows how to do it," Honshin told him easily, grinning at Gonou. "I know that look."

Gonou scratched under the eye without the stupid monocle and grinned sheepishly at her. "Well, I did have a thought," he said with an embarrassed little laugh. "I don't know whether it will work..."

"Shut up," his Sanzo said forbearantly, "or keep talking."

Chuckling, he agreed, "Well, all right, Sanzo. But it depends, Sanzo-san. Homura had two sutras--in this world, at least. In your world, if Kougaiji-san wasn't there to claim the Bright Land's sutra...?"

Sanzo frowned at him, and shot a suspicious glance at her irked counterpart, who droned, "I'm retrieving my property," and one at Kougaiji, who looked faintly smug. Taking this as a promise of good behavior, Sanzo slowly reached into her sleeve and drew out a tightly wound scroll, bordered in blue. Her counterpart made a sour (but not covetous) face and she looked marginally less surly as she put it away.

"Excellent!" Gonou said happily, beaming indiscriminately around the table. "Then we shouldn't have any problem."

Five minutes later, phrases like 'Are you insane' and 'If you think I'm going to' were being tossed around like confetti, and even Gojyo looked ready to strangle him.

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: Well, immobilizing the pages didn't work, but suppose we try this...

(aims qiball at page source)

Tenpou: (impressed) My, my, Hakkai-kun! You're a very quick study!

Hakkai: Well, it just occurred to me; I thought I'd give it a try.

Tenpou: Keep this up, and we might be able get my old job back... It seems, however, that I still have resources of my own.

(opens the door)

Konzen: LEAVE THE FUCKING CODE ALONE, YOU SONOFABITCH! YOU'RE JUST MAKING MORE PAPERWORK! YOU'RE NOT THE ONE WHO HAS TO WORK IN QUINTUPLICATE, YOU INCONSIDERATE BASTARD!
(stomp stomp thwack storms off)

Hakkai: @,@ Sanzo... high heels... lilac... hair... (swoon)

[end part 10]

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Chapter 11: Interlude: a brief account of battle

Notes: This is for those of you who want to know how the ladies kicked Homura’s pansy kami ass without Kou and company. And anyone who claims it’s just a vehicle for the next section of omake is, er, absolutely right. As for those of you who don’t yet know how the -gentlemen- kicked Homura’s pansy kami ass--

WARNING: this ‘chapter’ is nothing but spoiler!

The Sanzette-ikkou (people seemed to enjoy Gojyo's lack of PCness, so I'll go with it) slams into the big door of The Tower That Could Never Be. Finding that it's inhabited by zombies, Kanan tells everyone to get to the door; she'll handle it. They retreat to the outside door and Kanan blows the whole floor, bringing the ceiling down and squishing everyone. Could Hakkai have done that? I don't know. Most of his anger is directed in.

They proceed to the banquet hall, where a lot of annoyed kami are picking rice out of their hair and trying to stop the candelabra from setting the splintery table on fire. Kaikara cries over the spilled food and is about to pitch a fit at Kanan over it until she points out that if the commander of these gentlemen right here hadn't thrown zombie youkai at them... After this, the battle goes very quickly. Kaikara stops about halfway through to nosh on unruined meat buns, since the scythe-on-a-chain seems to be the weapon best suited to the enemy, until Sanzette kicks her out the door, impatiently announcing that they're going on ahead.

Kenren's curvy incarnation is not recognized, partially due to the way anyone who gets half a look at her at any kind of a range also gets a faceful of crimson braid ornamented with sharp metal objects, until she gets scratched and Tenpou's incarnation pitches a cold fit. At this point the remaining kamis stop, stare, start snickering, and are promptly dispatched with prejudice and extreme indignation. Since Kanan is already there (and not a recently unlimited youkai), she doesn't distract Honshin from the god whose neck is under her crescent-blade, and the incident with the illusory mother never happens.

Sanzette and Goku get captured on schedule, but where Sanzo hangs from his wrists and needs to be--or let's say rather he gets rescued from getting shot by Kougaiji before he has a chance to act, Sanzette doesn't have the same fatally annoying effect on the widower Zenon, and instead of wasting time fighting with Kou, the three kamis hurry up and do the ritual before 'Kenren' and 'Tenpou' can get upstairs (and there are a lot of stairs, and the stairs aren't very stable anymore).

The fight between Shien, Zenon, Kanan, and Honshin is pretty much like the one we're familiar with, except that Kanan and Honshin are in much better shape than Gojyo and Hakkai were by this point and, having more energy, Honshin is making snippy comments about how only Kanan could talk a god to death all the way up the rest of the crumbly stairs.

The rest of the story's pretty much the same, too--except our heroic prince isn't around to slow matters down with his need to reclaim his self-importance. Sanzette just fends Kaikara off until she can reach her forehead, which takes long enough that she and Kaikara get to see a little more of the genesis of Homura's dream world. And, of course, that Homura, pervy little nutter that he is, makes fewer attempts to grab the monkey's tail during their fight. This may or may not be why Kaikara is slightly less upset about his death than Goku was, depending on whether the reader is more of a feminist or a slasher. ^_~

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: Actually, it seems that it's only me just at the moment.

I regret to inform you--well, no, actually, I'm afraid I'm so impolite as to not regret it at all in any way whatsoever. Regardless, it seems to be up to me to inform you that despite Hakkai-kun's extremely hard head--he gets it from me (blush)--he has been unconscious since Konzen trampled all over it.

(At least, I think it was for that reason, although a person of less delicate sensibility might suggest that it had something to do with Konzen's trouserless robes.)

Regardless, since there's no one awake to try and stop me from getting lai--I mean, from clicking the link, there will be no omake for this chapter. Since it must be so and all that, gentlebeings, and I hope you will permit me the pleasure of wishing you all a very good morning. Jaaaa ne.

[end part 11]

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Chapter 12: Sanzo

WARNING: this chapter is as weird as the last one in an entirely new and different (and in my opinion creepy) way. We will be back on track next time (although it’ll take a little longer to get back to the plot); this is NOT the main pairing for the story--it's just that this scene has to happen before we can move on. But there’s a good 8-plus single-spaced pages of Hakkai’s underhanded, smitten, angsty POV coming up next, so just hang tight.

When the walking dead had returned to their camp for the night, Sanzo found Cho Hakkai down at the stream, looking young and colorless in his nightshirt, staring a hole through a basket of bloody clothing. It was nearly dark and they didn't know what animals were in the area, forget youkai. She wouldn't have been able to smell one next to her with Kaikara and that Goku boy in such close proximity, overpowering everything with their combined aura of itan, and if Sanzo couldn't, an ordinary man like Cho certainly couldn't. So what she said to him was, "Are you trying to pick a fight?"

He blinked slowly. At the end of it his eyes were less huge, but only slightly less blank. "Actually," he said, "I thought I'd do some laundry. Is there something you need, Sanzo-san?"

"Yes." She hated having to admit it, though, and she locked resentful eyes with him to make sure he knew it.

"Oh, well, if you'd like to add your robe to the pile," he began. Realizing somewhere in the middle that she had no tolerance for joking at the moment, he amended, "Tell me, then."

"Fix my healer."

He looked at her straight on, then, surprised. "Kanan? But she seems to be doing--remarkably well, in fact," he smiled wistfully.

Sanzo snorted. "I've never known her to be 'well.'"

"This unworthy person isn't exactly the poster child for mental stability himself," he murmured wryly. She wasn't sure whether or not he was actually talking to her.

"I don't care about you," she said bluntly. "But you're the one who can help. Of course, it's your choice. If you aren't willing..."

"Please, please," he waved a hand deprecatingly. Again, she wasn't entirely sure which one of them he was deprecating. She probably deserved it for that clumsy attempt at emotional blackmail. "Willing is not the concern. Sanzo-san?" he asked after a moment. "May I ask you a question?"

"Another one?"

"About Kanan." She grunted, and he dipped his head in thanks, then propped it on his arm, on the basket, and absently thumbed his earlobe. The part of Sanzo that was always watching noted with interest that the pseudo-siblings had mannerisms they didn't share. "I can see that she didn't meet you for the same reason I met Sanzo. Then why did she merit the Sanbutsushin's attention?"

"Genocide," she told him without mercy.

She received no horror, though, no outrage, no disbelief. He only looked perplexed, and then more so, and finally it burst out of him. "How?"

Her mouth twisted. "Pure indignation, I'd say."

"Yes, yes, I meant, physically how."

"Qi," she answered, taking pity.

"Che," he sighed, looking vaguely annoyed. And then his long lips quirked, and he murmured, "So much for the direct approach."

She blinked. "I meant qi."

"Yes, I know," he reassured her, smiling, his mind somewhere far off. "A, ah, a private joke. But Sanzo-san, I really don't know what you expect me to be able to do to help her."

She glared at him, and he blinked, turning wide-eyed to her with the same knee-jerk sensitivity to her intensity that was considerably less annoying in Kanan, who had a right to it. "What," she asked with deliberate precision, thinking that the slutroach would have been able to insinuate this better, "could she do to help you?"

He recoiled instantly. And she'd thought he was wide-eyed before. "Sanzo-san," he said stiffly, coldly, in a courtesy to curdle blood and freeze bone. She felt more comfortable, now that he was acting like a Cho. "Is it your business?"

"Very much my business," she said, still heavily and deliberately.

The arctic fury didn't entirely dissipate, but it cracked a little when his visible eyebrow leaped towards his headband, grey in this diminishing light. "Is it so?" he asked, a little more archly than was in her opinion necessary, his littlest finger twitching on the basket. She nodded curtly, and the temperature plummeted again with his slitted eyes. "Then I must confess myself disturbed, Sanzo-san, that you would make such a suggestion."

"I'm the one with the right to make it," she snapped. "Your ghost's in my bed already--I want it out. And I want that dead youkai bastard out, too. You can do a lot of that."

"So pragmatic, Sanzo-san," he noted pleasantly, nearly hissing.

"So fraternal, Cho-san," she spat back. "She's not yours to protect." His lips disappeared. He wasn't hers to protect, either, and so she pressed on ruthlessly. "I want you gone because you're in my way. I'd share with you just for that. Him I want gone because she can't talk to about any man but Jien without bracing herself, she can't look at any couple without flinching, and I'm fucking sick with it." After a moment, she corrected, "Of it, I mean."

"I know what you meant," he said quietly, his face drained to a sick pallor. "I see. Of course--but Sanzo-san, there's another complication. I--that is to say, I'm not exactly--"

"I know you're not free," she said impatiently. "If he's such a selfish bastard as to not want this for you when I can see you bleeding out your eyes, you can tell him I put a gun to your head."

"You would, too," he chuckled absently, still pale, and then blinked. "Hanh?"

"Don't bother acting innocent," she snorted. "That kappa's obvious enough for you both. If he bites her eyes out I'm holding you responsible, by the way."

Suddenly he wasn't pale at all anymore. In fact, he looked positively intrigued. "Is he, now," he breathed. His eyes were painted with the most bizarre expression she'd ever seen: a radiant, almost crazed look of disbelieving speculation. It was too wild for him; his affable scholar's face could barely contain it. "I suppose one can put some stock in an outside, unbiased viewpoint."

"Pathetic," she told him, chewing down her smile.

"Oh, well, perhaps," he said cheerfully, still lit up at the chakras with that manic glow. The exuberance with which he started scrubbing at a really ugly half-cape was completely out of place. She recognized it as their Goku's after a minute.

"Hakkai," she said when she couldn't stand it anymore, instead of clobbering him with her fan.

He looked up. "Hm?"

"Shut up. You're tone deaf."

He shot her an amused and disgustingly happy little quirky look. "No one's forcing you to stay, Sanzo-san."

"I'm not going anywhere until you've done what I want," she reminded him, and blinked. That was the fastest mood swing she'd ever seen, and Kaikara had had some good ones in the past. Albeit mostly with the fulcrum in her stomach.

"Ah," he said eventually, dull and gentle and careful again, and started washing a very familiar looking robe with precise hands.

"You could consider it payment for information," she suggested after a moment, taken aback by his sudden withdrawal.

He looked at her sharply, not smiling. "That kind of vulgarity doesn't suit you at all, Sanzo-san." Perhaps in apology, he added, "It's a strange thing. My mind seems to be too small to hold them both at once."

"That's just pain," she assured him. The door of the inn behind them was opening, and someone who didn't set her alarms off was walking up to them. "It diminishes as the stitches take."

He flashed her a humorless little smile. "Mm," he commented noncommittally. She'd known Kanan long enough to hear 'stop nagging; I've already agreed' in it.

"Sanzo, you're giving medical advice?" Kanan, standing at Sanzo's shoulder, scolded in the kind of dangerous voice that was more than half giggles underneath, before turning to her pseudo-brother in concern and asking, "Do you need it, Gonou?"

"Ah--no, thank you," he smiled up at her. It was a painful kind of smile, but mostly it was an echo of his thanks. "Nothing's reopened. It's only that Sanzo-san made an, anh, a somewhat unexpected proposal."

So he really was going along with it. Good. All those little splintered instants of green-eyed panic whenever a man tried to charm the wholesome looking one were starting to give Sanzo an ulcer, however quickly and invisibly Kanan mastered them. Besides, Sanzo refused to be so attached as not to dislike it if she was being used as a defense against the Dreaded Male Organ. She wasn't going to be anyone's substitute or second choice.

"Proposal my ass," she said coolly, meeting her favorite pair of wary eyes without apology. "It was an order. Physicians, heal thyselves."

Kanan went into retreating-while-she-dissected-the-implications mode and said lightly, "Is that a real word?"

"Well, the meaning is certainly clear enough, so I suppose it qualifies," Hakkai said thoughtfully, just as easily. Sanzo didn't interfere, since he was clearly going along with the diversion to give Kanan her space.

"And it's part of a proverb. Or a set phrase, at least. Still, in the plural..."

"But I don't think any other of the archaic forms lends itself any better," he pointed out helpfully. "Theeselves? Yeselves? No. And Yerselves lacks something, I think."

"It is a little piratical," Kanan agreed solemnly.

"Thine own selves, perhaps, although the connotations there are--"

"Shut. Up," Sanzo said wearily. It was at times like this that she almost wished she were sleeping with Kaikara instead, who was at least possible to control.

"Well, I really don't understand why you'd make a suggestion like that, Sanzo," Kanan said, in the dangerous voice that had no giggling underneath it at all. "Unless it's a matter of voyeurism, in which case--"

"Screw that," Sanzo said hastily, mostly because she really, really didn't want that sentence finished. "I never said I was going to watch." She paused, and amended, "I never said I was just going to watch..."

Hakkai made a stifled sound, turning his head away quickly, but she could see his cheeks rounding, his color rising.

"Sanzo," Kanan exhaled, exasperated. "You can't ask Gonou to let us use him as a toy."

"No. But as a medicine? Watch me."

"I don't need any medicine, Sanzo," she said tersely.

"We're out of here tomorrow," Sanzo shot back, narrow-eyed. "He's staying here. You are leaving him here. Say goodbye."

That shut her up. Her lips went thin and her eyes crushed wide. Sanzo scowled out across the river, resolving to sacrifice some mouldy piece of insect-riddled fruit to their patron, the goddet of Mercy and Compassion, whose sense of humor bit kappa tail hard. These stupid situations with no good ways out just kept on happening. Being the first one to see them coming didn't usually help any more than it was helping now, either.

"It's just a theory," Hakkai observed, apparently answering Sanzo's assumption that his way of getting them home would actually work.

"Gonou, it's too much."

He turned back to them, his face mild and almost disinterested. She could see it cracking around his eyes. "You can't possibly imagine," he said evenly, pleasant with an undertone of scoff, "that it would be an imposition."

"Too much for me," Kanan explained.

Sanzo met green eyes again. The shape was a little different, but the implacable look behind them, telling her that this was a refusal that he would respect and so would she if she enjoyed breathing with whole ribs, was very familiar.

"Ah," he said, drawing himself to his feet. There was something about the way that man moved, placidly deceptive undercurrents a lulling contrast to his sister's icy waterfalls. He held out his hands to her while Sanzo watched, cursing silently, and held hers in an insufferably graceful benediction for a moment. "Then the woodcutter will withdraw, and leave Chang E to the sunlight. The last thing I want," he added, hushed and rough, bringing her hands up to his lips and kissing her fingers softly, "is to hurt you more."

Her hands clenched on his, and she reached to caress his cheek. "You can't help it," she said tenderly.

"Nor can you," he agreed with a rueful smile. "If I can hurt you less, any way, any way at all, just tell me how. Any way, I'll do it."

"Don't you think it would be more, this way?"

They were leaning towards each other now, two supple irises pulled together by some vagary of wind and gravity. Sanzo had not forgotten to breathe, but her shoulders lowered a notch.

"To be honest," Hakkai sighed, brushing Kanan's long fingers again and wrapping both hands around them as though it were the most natural thing in the world, "I think Sanzo-san is right. This chance... Kanan, every drop of rain is your blood to me. Each flash of lightning, my knife in your hands in your throat. Any other way to say goodbye--Kanan, I'd almost believe in mercy."

"And this way would have the merit of being convincing," Sanzo said dryly. "Convince your body, and it will convince you."

"If you feel the same," Hakkai said. He didn't actually take his eyes off Kanan to flash her the dirty I-can-handle-this-thanks-so-much-for-interrupting look, but she could feel it anyway, and smirked. "But you'd be risking more."

"I think," Kanan said consideringly, and lifted her head an inch to smile wistfully at him, "I think that's a risk I wouldn't mind running."

"Wouldn't you? Kanan, you must have seen, I've changed. Even apart from having been a different Cho Gonou to begin with."

She blinked, then her smile widened. "Well, yes, that was a little obvious," she murmured. "Still, unless he's given you some dreadful disease...?"

Now it was his turn to blink, and his brow furrowed as he rocked back a little on his heels. "I beg your pardon?"

"No? Well, in that case, yes. It is a risk this week, but I don't mind at all."

Sanzo groaned very loudly inside her head. Sakari was considerably less annoying than certain other people in their party, but Sanzo hadn't really taken into account the possibility that Kanan would want to give her a little sibling. Still, it made sense, in a twisted kind of way, and since childcare had never been a problem before (and would probably be less, if they could use babysitting the kid to keep Sakari out of trouble), she couldn't really have a problem with it if Kanan wanted a pregnancy without resentment. No one could possibly resent Satori, who had surprised them all so far by not getting the crap spoiled out of her, but things had been different before she'd been born.

"The change doesn't bother you?"

"Why would it?" Kanan smiled up at him warmly, and turned the smile on Sanzo, who was glad she was sitting down because melting visibly was fucking embarrassing. "I've changed since then myself."

Hakkai blinked again and frowned a little, as though he'd suddenly found himself in the middle of a new and different conversation. But then Kanan was pulling him down, and when their lips came together he seemed to forget whatever had disturbed him.

Eying them, Sanzo leaned back on her elbows and got comfortable. Maybe just watching hadn't been such a bad idea after all.

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: Ah, Hakkai-kun, you're awake. How do you feel?

Hakkai: Inclined never to smile at Gojyo's hangovers again. Tenpou-san, we're getting disturbingly close to the end of the fic.

Tenpou: Indeed we are, Hakkai-kun! Why, there's only that left, and that, and that...

Hakkai: Precisely. And there is a seme at the end of this fic.

Tenpou: (hormone sparkles) So we have been led to believe.

Hakkai: (very tired) Tenpou-san, I'm begging you. Please, do not go to the next page.

Tenpou: Begging?

Hakkai: (has had no pride in years) Certainly.

Tenpou: ...You know, Hakkai-kun, for someone who claims not to get along with semes, you make a magnificent sub.

[end part 12]

Back to index

Chapter 13: Hakkai part 1

WARNING: Language. Angst. Verbosity. Connivance. Shonen-ai .

Hakkai stole away. Closing the door of the inn behind him, he leaned against it and exhaled steadily until the tremors subsided. Tilting his head back against the cool wood, he informed the ceiling in a friendly manner, "I was woefully unprepared for that."

He felt better, saying it aloud. The thought had been pounding through his head in extremely large boots since Kanan had muscled him to the ground.

He'd allowed it, of course--the main point of the exercise had been for her to feel in control of what happened to her--but he had known then how foolish he'd been to think he'd had the least idea of what he'd been getting himself in for.

And he still hadn't finished the laundry.

The prospect of laundry held no allure and less solace. If he went down to the pantry he would almost certainly find some kind of alcohol, although probably not enough to even blur the edges of the world. The others were impressed by his capacity--they didn't realize what a curse it was, leaving him unshielded against himself, that hostile universe.

Alternately, he could make a snack for the children and wake them up to watch them eat it. That would take enough concentration to distract him. He thought, rather fiercely, about all the things he could make for them as he went to the kitchen. He could make complicated things, delicate things, tell them it was to thank them in advance for what they would do in the morning, since he wouldn't be able to thank Kaikara afterwards. They would either believe him or neglect to care.

But what he reached for in the kitchen was the soap, because the children needed sleep more than an extra meal. Also, there would be questions in the morning if the laundry wasn't done. Probably there would be no shouting or resentment, but eyebrows would certainly be raised. And in any case, he'd soaked everything in salt water and detergent to get the blood out, and he wasn't sure how long he could leave it before the cleansing slime started to eat through the fabric.

And so he scrubbed, although his body ached in a pale echo of the rest of him, although the scrubbing was too brainless to even begin to calm the roiling of his thoughts.

His intention had been to ease her pain, and hand her back stronger. His will had carried him that far, at least. But the bitter, the thorning, the things that had pierced him when those two had kissed...

Unreal, unreal, that he stood straight with bruises on his ribs and thighs and clean soap between his fingers while they were still out there biting each other. He hoped it wasn't like that between them all the time, that they were only angry with each other now for needing to use him.

He had an uneasy feeling that he'd failed to communicate something important.

He could still feel her lips. For a few minutes it had been her in his arms, soft and wondering again. He'd had her again for that long, and although she'd called him Gonou in that distressing way of hers, for a moment it had been the impossible phantasm of Hakkai and Kanan, easing together bittersweet, and that had been the end of him.

But not of her. And what she'd asked of him then--he was glad, very glad to have finished already, because it became very clear that she was using his hands and his mouth to clean herself of the centipede's taint.

It was something he'd wanted for her, and had done willingly and without regret. There was even relief in not having to wonder anymore at what had happened to her, a huge lifting of oppression. His imagination was infinitely inventive.

Still, overpowering all that, there had been horror in his heart. He had touched her tenderly but without desire, and it had been extremely irritating to feel Sanzo-san approving his lack of response from off to the left.

And then Sanzo-san had gotten involved, and they really had used him as a toy, and now his tongue ached and the hot water pounded on his cramped fingers and it had just felt wrong, unequivocally wrong to touch Sanzo like that, any Sanzo, and how was he going to meet the same frosted lavender eyes in the same face in the morning, ride with the same fine hair in his peripheral vision, sit next to him all day without thinking of the nonexistent softness behind the bamboo breastplate, the sweet, surprising haven that wasn't there, or to go to sleep three feet from him?

Hakkai was having a difficult evening.

He dried the clothing with a cautious use of qi--cautious both not to singe the cloth and not to be seen, because he knew that if anyone ever caught him doing this, especially at the end of such a long day, he'd never hear the end of 'frivolous energy expenditure.' And yet Sanzo certainly wouldn't wait anywhere long enough for his robes to dry themselves naturally, let alone his jeans.

The mending was easier. He had to pay attention to that. But when it was done, he had to back to the bedroom and Look Them All In The Eye And Face The Music.

Only not really, he assured himself, standing before the door and gazing with dislike at the knob. He would have to turn it in a minute, since it would look very odd for him to sleep in the kitchen. He wouldn't have to look them in the eye, because everyone would almost certainly be asleep, and the only 'music' he would have to face wouldn't be very melodious. Unless, of course, Gojyo's instinct for the erotic had roused him and

Gojyo.

"Gojyo," he groaned, just whispering, and turned to slide down the wall. He put his forehead on his knees and took a moment to breathe. It was self-indulgence, of course, but still--how unbelievably flighty of him. What was he to do now? Even if it wouldn't have been dazzlingly stupid on his own part to climb into bed with Sanzo tonight of all nights, the man would probably shoot him. And if he slept on the floor when both beds were doubles--well, he cringed to think of the cutting remarks he'd be subject to in the morning, the disinterested scorn and the threats to take the wheel away again. Also, Gojyo would look hurt. Unacceptable.

But Gojyo. Would Gojyo smell woman in his sleep? And what would he do if he did? Gojyo, for whom sleeping beside a woman was commonplace, who had for those circumstances a set of knee-jerk reactions Hakkai had never been privy to. If only it weren't too late to use the bathhouse, because Hakkai could sense Sanzo a mile off and there was still a Sanzo at the river, close to the shaded, canny brilliance of a qi-user. Even the morning was too soon to face those two again.

And even if Gojyo didn't. Even then.

Sanzo-san had said, what was it? That Gojyo was obvious. And Sanzo was nearly always right, and Sanzo never said anything aloud until he was sure of it, and then only if it needed saying.

So Gojyo was obvious.

He had wondered, had told himself it was wishful thinking, had buried his thoughts in the bright sky and the road ahead and the blurring scenery and the purring dragon beneath him, had turned silently to poetry, philosophy--even mathematics, in desperate cases. He'd recounted the eighty-one battles of the heroes whose path they followed, revised the essays he'd never written a thousand times over, recited the Analects and all the classics until he knew them seamlessly. He'd composed poetry that was really terrible, on the most meaningless of subjects, had woken his friends with his amusement to either stare at him in blank incomprehension or join him in laughing at himself.

And sometimes he'd given in, in quiet moments on the road when they were all dozing around him, had relived a dark voice in his ear or a hand on his arm or a solid presence at his back and, smiling helplessly, cursed himself a thousand times over for a wretched fool.

Sometimes he'd yielded farther even than that, in the dark of a clear night, when he was doubled up with Gojyo's empty bed, when his friend sought better entertainment than cards. He'd imagined himself in her place, whoever tonight's inconsequential her was. It always seemed to go unrealistic and unsatisfying at the end, though. His disbelief could be suspended only so far, his imagination carry him only so much farther without experience for fuel.

But Gojyo was obvious.

Anytime for you, babe. Not trying to steal your man.

"Cho Hakkai-sensei," he told his chest, "you think too much."

People, Sanzo not least, had been telling him that for years, and Sanzo was reliable. If it took slumping against a wall and staring at his naval to reach enlightenment on his own, then perhaps there was something to be said for self-indulgence. He would permit himself a little more.

Gojyo was sprawled all over the bed. Good. He had an excuse, then.

So standing there for another minute or ten gazing blankly down until his eyes burned out of his head would be not only cowardice but wasted cowardice.

Right? Right.

Now it only remained to convince his feet.

He looked down at them, annoyed. After all, they were his feet.

His toenails seemed to stare up at him smugly in the moonlight, reminding him that they were his feet, and therefore were, in fact, doing exactly what he told them to, whether or not he wanted to admit it.

Well, it was his brain, too, he scolded himself, and with that was able to insinuate himself under the covers.

Of course he had shared with Gojyo before. But it had always been the same, ever since the reason he was flat on his back was the gash in his front. Gojyo seemed to assume that this was how he always slept, and curled away to give him room to do it. He'd been glad of that for a long time, while he was still tender and even after, when it was only the memory of pain that prolonged his habit.

Well, he'd been kicked and sliced at and punched and whipped and sat on today, and gouged into with fingers and nails and blunt human teeth, and the oldest scar was giving him considerably less trouble than any of the others. And there was Gojyo's wiry arm, flung out so temptingly, and there was his inviting shoulder. Hakkai settled in.

After a moment's consideration, he stretched out an arm and pulled Gojyo's free hand over his back. Self-indulgence, yes, and look how happy Goku was, how much more often than anyone else, but also a calculated risk. Gojyo might wake up and ignore the implications, or he might pitch a nervous fit. Either way, Gojyo would have to notice, and then to think, and to take some kind of action. Even inaction would be informative.

He couldn't maintain a purely rational mind, though. Weakness felt wonderful. His first night alone, all those years ago at the orphanage, had been in a very real way the end of the world. Before that there had always been his sister, his mother. He'd lain awake at night, unable to sleep without a lulling heartbeat, cursing the cold stars. He'd spent weeks learning their names so as to curse them better, cursed every god in heaven and invented names for them, so as to be able to curse them personally, as well.

He was almost certain that one of those made-up names had been Shien, the Assistant. He felt a little guilty about that now, in the light of recent events. But until he met up with, say, Goujun of the Excellent Karma, Kinsemi the Golden Cicada, or that most-often abused Litouten, the Official of the Eastern Sky to whom his young mind had given the oversight of China, he wasn't going to worry about it.

Certainly not now. Not pressed against anchor and home, not melted over a perfection of innocent, unsuspecting playboy. If by some wild mischance Sanzo-san had been mistaken, Gojyo was really in for it. Hakkai was implacable, once he'd made up his mind, and he didn't take disappointment well.

Actually, Sanzo might be in for it as well, since Sanzo-san wouldn't be there to take her own proper share of Hakkai's displeasure.

He smiled into Gojyo's neck at the thought and reached out to take a rough hand in his, run his fingers over it. He wasn't really worried, not with the little unconscious shifts Gojyo had made to accommodate him, only spinning possible futures. It was a drowning of relief just to be here, warm and enfolded. He had to protect himself.

But he'd decided to give in, for now, and he would.

This hand in his--it had caressed him everywhere once, soothed him and held him together for weeks on end, and never touched like that again. Hakkai felt a little cheated; even if he'd been awake for it he wouldn't have appreciated it properly at the time. He couldn't even imagine it, not really. These hands, broader than his own, had been different hands then. A townsman's hands, most of their callous thin ridges from cards and dice, a man who practiced with a weapon but didn't live by it. What they might have been like then on his skin was not what he imagined, when he thought of it now.

Hakkai still had civilized palms, smoother even than they'd been before the journey. Hakuryuu's steering wheel had a spongy upholstery, grippable but yielding, and he almost never had occasion to hold an inkbrush lately. He certainly never held a weapon when he fought--never again. Also, Gojyo made him wear lotion whenever they were driving in the open, so that the backs of his knuckles wouldn't peel away in the unrelenting sunlight. He could fool anyone with these hands.

This one wasn't soft anymore. Hakkai moulded it in his, running his thumb over the stripes of callous that hinted at spilled blood and cracked bone, caressing with his fingers the bony knobs of raw knuckle that whispered the secret of staying alive in a world where science could kill reason. Hakkai was strongly in favor of staying alive, and in particular he was in favor of Gojyo staying alive. Also, the friction caught at his palms, at his fingertips, almost as though it were inviting him to stay.

The thought of Gojyo's body welcoming him was overwhelming. The longing parted his lips and he tasted salt. Unbearable. One hand clutched the hand it held, the other trembled and settled inexorably above a hip. How fortunate for Gojyo that he slept in his white shirt--otherwise, he would have been in serious jeopardy. Even now he was, as it was a tank rather than a turtleneck. Really, Hakkai was going to have to have Words with himself in the morning. He was almost sure he had decided not to mouth at Gojyo's neck, and here he was, doing it anyway and not stopping.

And still not stopping and oh, Gojyo's hand was firming on him, sliding across his back to hold him close. He shuddered with the reeling bliss of it, pressed closer still. Gojyo shifted obligingly and pulled a little with his arm, and suddenly his thigh was sliding hot between Hakkai's legs and Hakkai didn't care anymore whether Gojyo was dreaming him a woman. But he was going to stop in a minute, really he was.

No, really, he was. Right now, clutching tight with every limb. This was how he wanted to wake up, to spend the night. This was how he wanted Gojyo to wake up.

Every morning, if possible.

The yearning that thought woke in him spilled out in a heated sigh, a silent moan. But much as he wanted to, he held back from crushing his hips against that welcome intrusion. He was an animal only in name.

And what a good thing he hadn't, because "'Kai," Gojyo whimpered, and then, sleepily, while Hakkai was still absorbing the thrill of that into his muscles and his marrow, frowned, "Nh?" And in disbelief, "Hakkai?"

Oh, well. Time for damage control, then. Which was very different from taking advantage of a sleeping man, Hakkai told himself virtuously. It was quite another situation now than it had been a second ago.

So when he rubbed up against the hard muscle between his legs it was in a deliberate and controlled manner. Or, well, not a deliberate manner, actually. His manner was unconscious, accidental, uncontrolled--and calculated to the micropascal. Still, it was lucky that he'd deliberately intended to make a noise, because he really didn't think he could have stopped himself.

"Ogod," Gojyo breathed, and the longing in it tightened Hakkai's chest and his hands. His thighs clenched and his mouth on Gojyo's throat went fervent and clinging. Then that hard hand on his back was shaking him, just jostling him in gentle vibrations. Hakkai had been both prouder and more annoyed with him in the past, but never both at the same time like this, winding through his lungs until he ached with it, stretched raw and tender. "Hakkai. Hakkai, wake up, buddy. I'm not Kanan."

There was a part of Hakkai that wanted to knee him then. Very, very hard. He could have claimed surprise, and Gojyo would have bought it. But Hakkai was patient when he'd set his mind on something, and his impulses were nothing to the adamantine mechanisms of his intention.

So instead of anything else, he just tucked his head into the strong curve of Gojyo's shoulder and grumbled out a wordless complaint. Don't wake me up. Let me dream a little longer.

"Come on, babe," Gojyo said urgently, jogging him harder. "Come on, wake up."

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: (rubs hands) So, have you given up, Hakkai-kun?

Hakkai: (gets off knees, loosens hands) I'm afraid not, Tenpou-san. In fact, as close as we are to the end of the fic, I'm afraid I'm getting rather desperate.

Tenpou: (Marshal Of Western Army) Oh, Hakkai-kun, you're not going to try and fight me, are you?

Hakkai: (Berserker And Genocide) Well, yes, that was the idea...

Tenpou: But Hakkai-kun, you're out of pawns.

Hakkai: Well, yes, but aren't you?

Tenpou: (ruffles his hair) Don't be silly, Hakkai-kun! We know how to deal with rampaging youkai around here--erk!!!

(Hakkai martial-arts him into a chair and secures him there with layman's sash.)

Hakkai: Please don't try to escape, Tenpou-san. I'm afraid I'm rather good with knots. o,^;;

Tenpou: #O.O# (hormone sparkles) Is this what they mean when they speak of narssicism?

Hakkai: ...ExCUSE me? [end part 13]

Back to index

Chapter 14: Hakkai (part 2)

WARNING: Language. Angst. Verbosity. Connivance. Shonen-ai .

"Come on, babe," Gojyo said urgently, jogging him harder. "Come on, wake up."

"I would prefer not to," Hakkai said as distinctly as he could with a well-developed deltoid between his teeth, and sighed with the inevitability of it. Gojyo was almost certainly going to make a joke now.

"Guess you've been having a good night," Gojyo teased.

Hakkai rolled off a bit, and fixed him with the most evil 'I was' glare he could muster.

"Ooh," Gojyo laughed, lifting his unpinned hand defensively off Hakkai's shoulder, which did not make Hakkai feel more kindly disposed towards him. Now his shoulders were cold and undefended. Gojyo belonged at his back. "Warii. But if you didn't want anyone to know, you should have washed off in the river."

"It's occupied," he said, possibly a little shortly. He'd half intended that Gojyo should misinterpret him, but it was galling to succeed.

"Really?" Gojyo was intrigued. "Who by?"

"You don't want to know," Hakkai assured him, smiling ruefully.

"Sure I do."

"I'm saving you many beatings," he said solemnly. "Be grateful."

"Really?" Gojyo was even more intrigued now. He glanced over at where Sanzo was pretending to be neither awake nor consumed with furious humiliation at having his echo's sex life discussed. "Huh."

"I was trying to save you many beatings," Hakkai amended regretfully. He could have sworn he saw the corner of Sanzo's mouth twitch at that, but of course Sanzo was asleep. Of course, Sanzo.

Gojyo chuckled--oh, that felt good--and then squirmed, which would have felt just as good if it hadn't clearly been the precursor of something unpleasant. "Uh--Hakkai, you wanna, uh, you must be uncomfortable."

"Not at all," Hakkai said serenely. He hoped Sanzo wasn't choking fatally over there. Poor Sanzo. He never wanted to room with anyone anyway, and he must have been relying on Hakkai to keep things decorous in here. Well, it wasn't Hakkai's fault that Sanzo-san had decided to make personal observations. Maybe he would explain it to Sanzo in the morning, depending on how annoyed he had reason to be by then.

"Oh."

"I'm quite comfortable, actually, Gojyo," he said cheerfully. "Please don't be concerned."

"Oh. I, uh, okay."

Sanzo made a noise like a sneeze, probably out of sheer disbelief. Hakkai pretended not to hear it and, for once, actually fought down his grin. "Oh," he exclaimed worriedly after what he judged to be an appropriate interval, opening his eyes wide in absolutely false remorse. "Oh, I should have thought! Gojyo, I'm so inconsiderate--am I making you uncomfortable?"

Before Gojyo even had a chance to stammer out some kind of an answer to that piece of wickedness (Hakkai really felt he ought to have been ashamed of himself), Sanzo made a high noise of incredulity and sat bolt upright, glaring bullets at them.

"S-Sanzo!" Gojyo gulped, freezing like a spotted deer.

"Oh, hello, Sanzo," Hakkai said sunnily, comfortably sprawled out all over the halfbreed and enjoying himself immensely. Was this what people meant, when they called youkai vicious? Probably not. Hakkai really couldn't picture Kougaiji, for example, behaving in such an depraved manner, and Kougaiji was, for all his upright likeability, certainly evil. "I'm afraid it isn't morning yet; Gojyo and I were just talking. Did we wake you? My apologies."

Sanzo swung himself out of bed and started yanking at the bedclothes. "Fuck you both," he snarled, "to India and back, in a rotting, rickety, rat-infested haywagon driven by a stinking, mangy jackal. With leprosy. In a thunderstorm." Pausing in the doorway with his arms full of blankets, he slammed his harisen parallel to the floor, aiming it at them like the revolver, and barked, "Especially you!" Hakkai winked at him, and got back a growl of pure exasperation before the door slammed.

"Oh, shit," Gojyo breathed, still frozen.

"Oh, dear," Hakkai commented, unconcerned. "I think we woke him up."

"Ya think?!" Gojyo demanded. To Hakkai's delight, his voice cracked.

"Now, really, Gojyo," Hakkai soothed. "If Sanzo prefers sleeping in the bathhouse to having a pleasant conversation, that's his choice, isn't it? We should respect the choices others make."

Gojyo stared at him, blinked, stared some more. "Did you do that on purpose?" he demanded incredulously.

"Um... possibly," he admitted, looking up at Gojyo a little sheepishly and letting go of his leg for verisimilitude. Damn. It was comforting that Gojyo knew him so well, though.

"You... unbelievable," Gojyo decided, shaking his head and starting to laugh. "Bastard."

"I wanted to talk to you," he explained, mostly truthfully. After a second's thought he added, a little accusingly, "Since you woke me up."

"Sure, blame it on me," Gojyo sighed, chuckling.

"Oh, well, if you insist," he agreed sweetly.

"Why not," Gojyo laughed. "He's sure as hell going to."

"Mm," Hakkai said noncommittally, doubting it. Sanzo was almost never mistaken.

"Well, he's out. You can get off now."

"This really is very comfortable, though," he said wistfully, and he wasn't faking that. "Don't you think?"

"...I guess," Gojyo said quietly, after a moment, and Hakkai breathed again. He squeezed Gojyo's hand gratefully, and settled his head down on his friend's shoulder. Someday, someday soon, not only would he be allowed to do this without subterfuge, but maybe Gojyo would even run fingers through his hair. It made him forlorn to think of it, but he could wait. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Saa ne," he said, shrugging a little.

"Kanan?"

"That's just it," he sighed. "She isn't."

Gojyo snorted. "You're just figuring this out?"

"Not at all," he said indignantly. "It was clear from the beginning. I can count up to four, Gojyo. 'Kenren,'" he corrected himself pointedly.

"I hear ya, 'Tenpou,'" Gojyo snickered, and grimaced. "You know the scary thing? It wasn't just Homura. One of those dead guys called me that right before you came in. He sounded--I mean, you could tell it wasn't 'cause Homura had told him something; they all choked and started taking me seriously. You think we really were gods? ...Think we were freaky-ass nutjobs like Homura?"

"I see you more as being a Kanzeon Bosatsu-sama type," he said placidly, and grinned when Gojyo sputtered. "You and I were born on this earth," he said more seriously. It was the only real answer he had. "Sanzo, too."

"And Goku?"

"Goku as well. He wouldn't be called the Great Sage Equaling Heaven if he were part of it."

"If that saru's a great sage, I'm--"

"A good thyme?" Hakkai finished for him, pleased with the pun.

It took Gojyo a second to get it, and then he groaned really loudly. "Hak-kaaai," he whined.

"A monkey's uncle?"

"Oi, oi..."

"The original good thyme," Hakkai decided, smiling.

"Had by all?" Gojyo snickered.

"Very nearly," he agreed. "You'll have to work on that."

"That girl is a terrible influence on you."

"No," Hakkai said thoughtfully. "That's not it." If anything, he felt as though an influence had been lifted, not laid on new. It was why he wanted Gojyo's arm back; the nape of his neck felt oddly exposed.

"You mean this is what you're really like?" Gojyo asked, his eyes wide and his brows up. Was that skepticism or terror fueling the doubt in his voice? "Can we look forward to snarky comments and random cuddly attacks from here on in? Cause I'm selling popcorn when Sanzo shoots you. I should make a fortune off saru."

"You should be used to the way I speak by now, Gojyo," he smiled reproachfully.

"Yeah, but it's scarier an inch from my neck."

"Oh, my," he chuckled, looking up wistfully again. "It seems I'm making you uncomfortable after all."

Gojyo needed a second to come up with an answer to that one. Hakkai had all night. "Nah," he said eventually, his voice tightly controlled. "Nah, not uncomfortable. You kinda took me by surprise, though."

"I've been a little surprised myself," Hakkai admitted. The resentment unfurling from behind his scar at the words was shocking, closing his throat with recriminations and self-pity.

"Yeah?" Some of what Hakkai was feeling must have shown up on his face, because Gojyo's arm came back, wrapping him up in blissful security.

"Mm." His control over his expression was tight, now. The last thing he wanted was for Gojyo to believe he'd done that deliberately, as well; poorly timed sincerity had been the downfall of many a swindler before him. "I can count up to four, and--Gojyo? Am I..."

"What?"

Something in his jaw was tight, and his cheeks ached from the effort of keeping his lips in place. "She really isn't Kanan," he explained. It was miserable, to think what he'd done with someone who wasn't Kanan, to think what he'd let that almost-stranger do with him.

"Kinda makes me wonder," Gojyo mused after a moment's close-lipped consideration, "what those kami would have looked like if they'd recognized you instead of me. Bet they would have wet their pants. I mean, me, I'm a laid back kinda guy. Some smokes, a little loving, nice cold bottle of foam, I'm happy."

"Then you think I am," he deduced unhappily.

"...She comes on a little strong," Gojyo said cautiously. "I guess Sanzette likes that, huh?"

"I think Sanzo does, as well," Hakkai confided, his lips curling up against a warm collarbone.

That was Gojyo making a face. "You don't mean he--?"

"No, of course not. But she's very honest, in a way. Sanzo likes things straightforward."

"Likes straightforward people, you mean."

"Mm. It's understandable, though, don't you think? Honesty can be refreshing."

"She comes on a little strong," Gojyo said, obediently veiling his dislike less this time. "I get it, 'Kai, I do. I know lots of women like that--least, I used to. But I'm glad I'm not stuck with the you that has to be that way."

Hakkai blinked, pulled up to meet his eyes in confusion. "Gojyo, I don't follow."

With an uncomfortable shrug, Gojyo said, "You're only the first man I've brought to bed."

"Well, yes, I know that," he said steadily.

"Nah, I mean--I used to be a bouncer, I ever tell you that? Not back in Jinggan. By the time I got to Jinggan I was good enough with cards to get by with them; this was while I was working my way as far from Xienyang as I could get." Hakkai let out a quiet, sympathetic chuckle, and got a wry one in return before Gojyo decided to inch closer to his point. Gojyo could be astonishingly circuitous for such a forthright man. "And I'll tell you, Hakkai, that me-chick?"

"You mean Sha-san?"

"Yeah, Honshin, her. She must be good. Really good. 'Cause she doesn't have the Look. You know the one. Hakkai, I pulled more painted girls out of alleys... they were my fault, you know?"

"No," Hakkai said skeptically. "And I don't believe you, either."

Gojyo chuckled a little, humorlessly. "No, of course not, not directly. But, I mean... I was a bouncer. It's one thing if you toss a guy out 'cause he's broke or the barkeep's cut him off. He'll just crawl home or to the next bar. It's different if you boot a nasty bastard for being a bully. Then he's lost a fight, and he has to win the next one before he goes to sleep, and so he's usually going to pick one he can win. So, the girls."

"I see," Hakkai said contemplatively. He did. "Gojyo, do you ever feel that the Minus wave is, well, somehow a clean menace?"

"Uh, no," Gojyo said carefully, as though Hakkai were perhaps six. "They eat people."

"I take your point," he smiled, cheering up. It was somehow good to be reminded that so-called ordinary, decent people were not the world's foulest horror, no matter how hard they tried for the honor. Just as well; he didn't want to be able to muster the righteousness to kill them all. Distastefully, he added, "And with their hands, as well."

Gojyo blinked, stared, made a dumbfounded noise, shook his head, and drawled, "Hakkai, I really wonder about you sometimes."

"It's messy," he said primly. "Entrails are very difficult to clean out from under your fingernails." He let Gojyo look sick for a moment, then offered, "I used to help her make sausages, when we could." Gojyo breathed again, and he laughed. "Well, all right, so you helped them out of alleys."

"Took 'em to the doctor, too, and afterwards I'd visit. Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"Stop looking like you're going to rip my throat out."

"I'm not going to rip your throat out," he protested, offended. How unkind of Gojyo, to suggest that he would become violent just because he wasn't the first stray Gojyo had followed up on!

"Well, stop glaring at me like that."

"I'm not glaring at you at all."

"Hakkai, they were hurt 'cause of something I did. Something I got money for. I felt responsible, that's all. It was different."

"I'm not glaring."

Gojyo blew out a loud breath. "Fine. You're not glaring. Just don't ask me in the morning why there's a steaming hole through my jaw."

"I would assume you had been endangering both our lives by smoking in bed," he said blandly.

"It was different, Gojyo insisted, pleading with him a little.

Hakkai sighed. "All right," he relented, but only because Gojyo should only ever have to beg him as a game. "It was different."

"It was. And afterwards, they were different. Hell, you know how it is. You stay braced for next time."

"Oh, yes," Hakkai said softly. Someone to whom something outrageous had happened--they would be forever cautious, but more than that they would reform to become the kind of person who would be less devastated by future atrocities. "I know how it is."

"But the thing is, you're braced for that thing."

"Well, of course. --Oh. Not for something else, you mean."

"Right. Someone who's been mugged probably isn't going to think about smoking in bed. Someone who's been burned is still gonna like going swimming."

"I know you have a point in there somewhere," Hakkai said lightly, smiling absently as he let his fingers drift a warm centimeter or so over the ripple of Gojyo's rib cage. That was usually Gojyo's line, although Sanzo glared it often enough. It was very pleasant, being able to turn it on him like this.

"You scared yourself," Gojyo said bluntly, "and now you're not afraid of anything else."

Hakkai's hand stilled.

"Matter of fact, you're so not afraid of anything else you scare the living shit out of me half the time," Gojyo added in a light voice that was pure fabrication.

"Gojyo," he said in a small voice, "that isn't true."

"You're right," Gojyo nodded judiciously in that same terrible, casual voice, his hair washing over Hakkai's arm. "I've seen you be afraid of, oh, maybe two people. It's easy to tell, actually; you can get pretty damn rude. Now, Chin Iisou I understood, but--"

"I don't think I was discourteous." Hakkai said indignantly, rolling to one side and rising to his elbow. "After all, I showed him everything he wanted to see." His throat had hurt for days from all the screaming.

"Ham," Gojyo snickered. "Trust me, you were rude. Snotty, even. Anyway, I understood him, but what's so scary about Dokugakuji?"

"When," he demanded, his indignation rising, "have I ever said one impolite word to your brother?"

"When," Gojyo mocked him right back, "have you ever said one word to my brother?"

To Hakkai's chagrin, he had to think about that one. "When I introduced Sha-san to him," he said.

Gojyo poked him in the nose. "Try again, 'Kai," he grinned. "You introduced him, too. That was a general introduction."

"Well... in the desert, then," he said righteously, rubbing his abused feature to make Gojyo smile. "When Sanzo was hurt. After Goku came back."

Gojyo blinked. "I don't remember that."

"You were unconscious."

He was favored with a long eyeballing that eventually decided to take his word for it, but conceded nothing. "Was anyone else conscious?"

"Well... no."

"So you didn't really have much of a choice, huh?"

"I was perfectly polite," he insisted mildly, seriously galled.

"Uh-huh. But I don't get it, Hakkai. He's good, but you're outta his league. Hell, I'm probably out of his league now, if we ever stopped kidding around. Where's the threat?"

"There isn't any, Gojyo," he said exasperated. "You're right, after all, he can't hurt me--"

His pulse pounded in his ears, once, like Sanzo's harisen coming down.

"Hakkai?" Gojyo asked from far away. The shock of square fingers on his cheek made him blink. "Hey, buddy, you okay?"

"You're not out of his league," Hakkai said dully, rolling onto his back and closing his eyes.

"Hey!"

"Oh, certainly you're a better fighter," he assured him, and his voice sounded like dry ash even to himself. "When you bother to fight."

"What do you mean?"

"Ordinarily," he said bleakly, "Kougaiji can give even Goku a run for his money. And yet Goku has only to decide that need outweighs consequence, and Kougaiji will fall. And that will be the end of the 'kidding around.' I've already defeated Yaone-san's desperation, but you and Dokugakuji-san have only occupied one another to keep him away from Sanzo. Gojyo, we don't know what he's capable of."

After a moment, astounded, Gojyo realized. "You're afraid he'll kill me."

Hakkai flinched, just his eyelid twitching. "I'm fond of Yaone-san," he said softly, his tongue heavy as bone. "But the day or so of sorrow her death would call in me wouldn't stay my hand for a Shanghai minute."

Gojyo amended, "You're afraid I'll let him kill me. Thanks a lot."

"It's not improbable. If he became serious, if it took you even an instant too long to realize it, or to adjust your attitude to match him..."

"Well, at least you're not assuming I'd just toss shakujou down. Anyway, he'd be a lot more likely to take me down so he could go after Goku than to kill me. And you could take him out in one shot."

"But I wouldn't," Hakkai advised him, cold and pleasant as an ice palace. His lips were so stiff they were probably bleached. "Far from it."

"So I was right after all," Gojyo said after a long, long silence. "You are the only thing you're afraid of."

Hakkai considered this, and forced his tight lips into as much of a curve as they would bend for. "I suppose I am," he admitted. Not quite accurate, but he didn't think Gojyo was ready to know his own power yet.

"Well, it makes sense," Gojyo conceded magnanimously, and Hakkai slitted his good eye open to see him nodding with that infuriating generous-judgement look he usually saved for Goku. "I mean, far as I know you've never lost a fight. Except with the entire Teng GeLi desert," he added thoughtfully, and Hakkai almost smiled. "But that wasn't really a fair fight," he said consolingly.

"No," Hakkai agreed, solemn. "It had the high ground."

"And you were outnumbered. And it must have been pretty ticked off, Hakkai." By now, he was grinning. "I mean, you did kick it in the shin. Talk about rude."

"Excuse me," he pointed out, rolling back onto his side. "As I recall, you and Goku were extremely insistent that I knock down that wall."

"It was swarming scorpions!" Gojyo protested, making a face.

Hakkai acknowledged the point with a tilt of the head, and then sighed. Whatever Gojyo was dancing around was clearly explosive, given the intricate steps he was taking to avoid it. "Get it over with, Gojyo," he said resignedly.

"You sure?" Gojyo asked, reaching out to make Hakkai meet his eyes. His thumb, perhaps accidentally, brushed Hakkai's lips.

Gojyo, at his mouth. Putting himself there.

"Tell me quickly," he whispered. Gojyo looked at him as though he were brave and some kind of a wonder, and Gojyo's eyes had gone the dark smolder of banked coals. Hakkai bit the inside of his lip until it bruised copper. "Quickly, Gojyo," he implored.

"Uh-h-hyeah," Gojyo breathed shakily, his fingers clinging reverent on Hakkai's face. There was only one thing to be done, and Hakkai couldn't do it. If Gojyo was going to understand him, was going to believe him, nothing could be allowed to come of this night. Absolutely nothing could be permitted that Gojyo would find unambiguous.

He lifted his hand and stroked Gojyo's off of him, bringing it down to the bed and holding it gently there. Terrible, that he couldn't permit himself even one kiss of those rough knuckles. He would have it later, and if the world broke this promise to himself also, it would learn the taste of his despair. "Gojyo."

But Gojyo was staring down at their hands, and clearly nothing short of a slap in the face or a noseful of smelling salts was going to move him.

Hakkai didn't have any ammonia handy.

He said, "Kanan."

Gojyo jerked and blinked, and his hand clenched under Hakkai's. But his face was perfectly normal when he lifted it, and there was nothing wrong with his sheepish grin as he said, "Right--sorry, guess I spaced out on you for a minute there, huh?"

"I understand perfectly," Hakkai assured him--blandly, and his expression bland too when apprehensive crimson eyes speared him. "But please, go on."

"Well, hell, Hakkai, do I have to? She did lose a fight. Lost it bad. Lost hard."

"I lost a fight once," Hakkai said into the silence that gripped him after that.

Gojyo blinked again, and smirked. "I don't believe you."

"I was quite young at the time, you understand," he explained. "I lost that fight without taking part in it."

"Well, there you go," Gojyo said, meaning that he would have won if he'd participated and clearly wondering where this was going.

Hakkai wasn't sure himself. "Everything was taken from me," he said, turning the thought over, unfolding it before him. "I lost like Sanzo."

"You're nothing like Sanzo," Gojyo said, sneering a little.

"Not anymore, happily. It's a cold place to live, Gojyo," he said, turning tired eyes up to the warmth he suddenly, desperately wanted to curl into again, to remind himself those days were over. "Bad enough when you're too young to be able to predict every coming moment, or young enough to feel the wonder when you're wrong. Sometimes..."

"What?"

But he hesitated. It was a bleak thought. "Who can change alone, Gojyo?" he asked with a sad little smile. "When I met her again--not this afternoon, of course I don't mean that--but her, when they brought her into the schoolroom, it was color returning to the world. And I could see the same thing in her eyes when she saw me--green, and then life."

"Yeah," Gojyo said softly, but Hakkai barely heard him.

"Everyone has to let someone save them, if they can. It's something you have to learn, to trust that way, and once you've learned to rely on yourself... Sanzo--he has a talent for finding the right place to be, but sometimes I worry that Goku came too late for him."

It was a miracle, really, that he himself hadn't come too late for Gojyo, who'd never spoken any breath of grace or even lasting company between his unexpected guest and uninvited solitude. But Gojyo made an art of keeping himself supple enough to enjoy moments as they came. And yet, even Gojyo had his silences. It was a thousand times worse for Sanzo, whose strength was clean, inflexible steel.

Gojyo was silent--mulling, possibly, over the tragedy of Sanzo, as Hakkai was. Certainly he looked as though he found something absurd, possibly even outrageous. And despite the sorrowful nature of the thoughts, there was something deeply, satisfyingly intimate about lying here, almost in Gojyo's arms, sharing them with him.

Perhaps Gojyo would like, some day, to hold him as they read a book together.

Finally, heavily, Gojyo said, "Hak-kai."

"Mm?" Hakkai asked, caught up in his image. He wouldn't mind holding Gojyo, either. One advantage to becoming youkai; even limited his solid bones could take a halfbreed's heavier build without creaking.

"You know how you chased Sanzo outta here a minute ago?"

"Mm," he said noncommittally, his eyes crinkling up. Sanzo had really been very gracious about it, all things considered.

"My turn," Gojyo glowered at him. "Tomorrow's going to be rough, in case you've forgotten. Now, maybe some people don't need any sleep, but..."

"They should be considerate of those who do?" Hakkai smiled, a little guiltily. He'd almost forgotten that Gojyo had been asleep when he came in. "Well--perhaps I'll just read for a little, to settle my thoughts. Do you mind?"

Gojyo yawned in his face, and flopped back into the mattress. Hakkai took a book out of his pack and pretended to read it . The moonlight was bright enough that Gojyo, with his two strong eyes and exaggerated opinion of Hakkai's minor scholarly obsessions, wouldn't know how obvious a pretense it really was.

Finally, when Gojyo's breathing was nearly even again, happily discarding the feeling that he really, honestly ought to have been ashamed of himself, he twined in all over his friend, heart to his ear and sweet lethargy pooling in his ankles and wrists, and let himself drift away.

After all, they were going to have a difficult morning the next day, he reminded himself virtuously, skirting the line between sleep and guilt, and it would be followed by either hard traveling or disappointment, at the very least. It was wisest to get not only the most but the very best sort of rest available.

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Tenpou: Well, I have to admit, Hakkai-kun, you are extremely good at knots. I can't move at all. And I'm frankly turned on.

Hakkai: ...I'm going over here now.

Tenpou: However, as I was about to say before I was so masterfully interrupted--

Hakkai: Way over here.

Tenpou: --I'm not entirely out of tricks.

Hakkai: (dubious) Is that so, Tenpou-san?

Tenpou: >8^> Oh, it is, Hakkai-kun! Here, I'll show you.

Hakkai: Oh, certainly. By all means.

Tenpou: Oh, Taishou! (heart)

[end part 14]

Back to index

Chapter 15: Sanzo

WARNING: Language. Angst. Verbosity. Connivance. Pairings in all flavors.

NOTES: Sanzo’s chapters is in two parts on ffnet and is whole everywhere else. And we’re doing the plotty scene next time or, I swear, I’m skinning all my muses. Yeah, Robs, even you; I rely on you to keep order in there! --Why I rely on you for anything I have no idea... oh, god, not the whipped-puppy look--quick, let’s move on to the story...

Actually, the bathhouse wasn't so bad, not that he was going to let any of those selfish idiots know that. He'd put his sleeping bag down on worse things than a smooth wooden floor under a roof in his time. It also meant that he got first crack at the hot tub in the morning--without any whining, even.

Hakkai came by too early anyway. Apparently he knew what was good for him, though, because he was already fully dressed and his combed hair was damp. So Sanzo only hit him with a brief Take One Step Towards This Water And Die glare before demanding, "What do you want?"

"I really do apologize," Hakkai said quietly. There was no remorse in him, but neither was there any trace of his usual false front of good cheer.

Sanzo grunted, and said, "Waste of energy."

Hakkai's lips twitched into an embarrassed little quirk, and he rubbed his bare ear. He probably wasn't embarrassed at all, the smug bastard. "Well, I slept very well last night," he offered, "so I suppose I can afford it."

"No doubt the kappa 'slept well' too," he said neutrally. It was a waste of energy, the morons, although at least he'd had enough warning to get out before they got loud.

The eye he could see widened innocently, and Hakkai said, all ingenuous, "I assume so, Sanzo, but I couldn't say for certain. I was asleep, you see."

That might have been a lie, or it might not. Just as well; Sanzo was beyond uninterested. What it was was a promise that Hakkai was, if not fully recovered, at least up for anything Sanzo was likely to need from him today. Hakkai wasn't hard to read when you remembered that he knew you.

He grunted again and Hakkai, smiling, said, "In any case, I though that you might like to be warned before the ladies descend on the bathhouse. Also, breakfast is nearly ready, Hirahara-san tells me."

Which meant that Goku would be bouncing out of bed soon and waking Gojyo out of sheer spite, assuming he hadn't already. It also meant that Hakkai had, for once, sensibly refrained from waking up two hours early to prepare another spread for eight-to-twelve. Unexpectedly practical of him, but Sanzo would take it as an apology instead of the favor he was possibly meant to.

He nodded shortly and closed his eyes in dismissal. Hakkai had seen enough skin yesterday--some flying in chunks across the room or getting caught in his nails, okay, granted, but either way it wasn't a list Sanzo wanted to add himself to. He waited until he was alone before reaching for his towel, and then moved fast. The gods were never merciful in matters of convenience, and even Hakkai hadn't bothered to knock.

Breakfast was, to his silent, scowling relief, merely the usual nonsense doubled, rather than last night's pandemonium. How much of the relative peace could be attributed to the lack of snobby youkai and how much to Hakkai's letting the innkeeper cook instead of trying to share a kitchen with himself, Sanzo didn't care to speculate.

The royal gaggle showed up too soon for Sanzo. He would have been just as pleased if they hadn't come at all; there were enough damnfools in his life already without Short, Broody, and Brick-Colored and his passel of sheep-eyed yes-youkai. Given a choice between sets of extraneous idiots, he'd take the four who were likely to fight on his side over the four who kept trying to steal his property and pound his ape.

He would have said so, too, if Hakkai and that poison-bleeding sister of his had stopped talking for long enough to let him say something instead of plowing ahead full-throttle to restore the natural order just because it was the natural order.

Those two were just as bad as Homura, in their own way, and deceptively selfish. Why should everyone else suffer just because they couldn't stand to look at each other? Sanzo couldn't stand Gojyo, but he put up with him for the sake of two strong fighters useful to the mission. But Hakkai couldn't even put up with one uncomfortable face for the sake of four.

Halfway through the teapot and a plate of warmed tea eggs that Hakkai had probably been saving for Goku (tough bananas, rice-for-brains), he was, if not exactly mollified, at least willing to admit that he'd been sent on his mission with three extra blades, not six-and-a-sour-bitch-who-got-his-back-up, and that he really had no interest in so far concerning himself with someone else's distressed universe as to take its weapons away.

So he was only ordinarily surly when they did show, and the fist he stuffed into the brat's face to shut her up before she could even start to call him Baldy had a meat bun in it. More than she deserved.

Opponent subdued. Game, set, and match: Genjo Sanzo. As an added bonus, everyone was staring at him warily, and the habitual dumb pride of slitted, flint-purple eyes was tinged with a grudging envy that, if Sanzo was any judge, would gnaw subtly away at his self-absorption in at least three ways for maybe a week or so.

"But she didn't even say anything yet," Yaone whispered, mystified and maybe a little awed.

Sanzo raised an eyebrow at her and drawled, "Why should I let her?"

"Ahaha," Hakkai said cheerfully. This particular false laugh pretended discomfort in order to cover up for a real one so that no one would feel mocked. Condescending bastard, it was a constant surprise to Sanzo that he never seemed to give the kappa a headache. "If everyone's done eating--"

Sanzo wasn't. He and the blonde both set their chopsticks down with pointed rattles, and glared.

"And if everyone will forgive my presumption..."

Maybe, if the so-called 'nice one' hadn't been getting such an obvious kick out of playing teacher/dictator.

"...it would probably be best to begin as quickly as possible. I'm sure that--"

He stopped. Looked bland to those who didn't know him and perplexed to those who did. Resumed.

"I'm sure that you ladies are anxious to rejoin the rest of your party, and I'm sure that after consulting the map, Sanzo-san and Sanzo will want to set out as soon as possible."

"How many days?" Sanzo asked with resignation, meaning 'until the next town' and tapping his finger three times impatiently on the table to tell Hakkai how to lie.

"Five," Hakkai said smoothly, pushing his monocle more securely into place to communicate his compliance. The blonde and her attachments looked at him as though he'd gone crazy. A more equal division of labor there, apparently. Whatever. "If we finish before noon and drive hard all the way. Allowing for mealtimes, of course."

Gojyo and Goku groaned in concert at the thought of three nights in a tent. Honshin and Kaikara should have, as well, instead of continuing to look as though Hakkai had left his mind on the riverbank. If they had, Dokugakuji might have joined his master in looking shifty, instead of alert and calculating. Damn. Now they'd have to change the sequence again, just in case.

"Let's get on with it," he snapped, standing, and glared resentfully at the blonde, the scrape of whose chair and the crack of whose voice had been almost indistinguishable from his own.

"Everybody got everything?" the kappa woman asked, pushing to her own feet with an upwards flaunting of her chest she hadn't been displaying before Yaone had walked in.

Kougaiji nodded shortly. Sanzo didn't even bother with that much, since his 'everything' was, as always, on prominent display.

"NOOOOOOO!" Kaikara wailed suddenly, and clutched at the table. "I'm not finished," she sobbed piteously, crocodile tears welling up in her enormous golden eyes.

To Sanzo's mixed disgust and amusement Gojyo, who would have grabbed Goku by the nose and hair and accused him of being a scaredy-ape trying to delay the inevitable until Goku's ego had been taunted larger than his emptiness, edged uneasily away and muttered, "Oi."

The look Hakkai shot him for that little piece of gratutious chivalry was educational.

Fortunately, everyone was too busy watching Honshin mock the girl away from the table and out the door to notice. Goku himself looked so smug that he must have been just in time to button his lip over his own wail when she'd started, so Sanzo smacked him anyway. "Let's go," he said gruffly.

If Sanzo had been more of a student of human nature than the disgusted observer he was, he might have been entertained by the way Honshin latched onto Dokugakuji after everyone disembarked from their respective dragons, leaving Gojyo to scuffle with the kids all the way up because a harried-looking Hakkai was busy forcing Yaone and his sister into a discussion of herblore.

He would have had to be in a much better mood. The mood he was actually in could have been improved if Lilin would either stay with Gojyo and the other noisy brats or even stay on his shoulders (it was useless to hope for decorum; he'd settle for consistency). The constant bouncing on and off, combined with the superior looks he kept catching at the corners of That Woman's purple eyes (bad enough if those looks were about Lilin; if they were about Hakkai she was going to be stiff and chilly when he sent her home), was slowly turning his shoulder muscles to barbed wire, and he could feel the froth waiting to seethe over his lips if he so much as opened his mouth . The obscenely perky teenager on his back was enough of a blow to his dignity already. He kept them closed.

There was a quiet "Sumimasen" at his ear, and Lilin's weight left him, this time without the obligatory bruising kick-off. "I would like to speak to Sanzo for a moment, Lilin-chan," the intervention said gently, putting her down. "Would you mind keeping Yaone-san company for a moment? And, ah, not fighting with Cho-san?"

Lilin made a disappointed "Nyaaa" noise, but bounced off. Yaone probably had food over there. Probably not a bra, though. Pity.

"What do you want?" he asked guardedly.

"Sa ne," Hakkai shrugged, brittle call-my-fear-foolish edges frozen on his pleasant smile.

"Ask a stupid question and I'll kill you," he warned, running over the list of probable answers. Yes, it was all right to refuse miraculous assistance; don't be a Mercy's boy; even heavenly attachments can weigh you down. No, it wasn't overly compassionate of him to send the women home; did Hakkai really want to be sharing his soup-pot and steamers and feeding two overgrown jeep-apes for the rest of his life?

"I'm a little concerned about Goku," Hakkai admitted.

"He's done this before," Sanzo said brusquely.

"Well, no," said Hakkai carefully. "That's not what I meant, Sanzo. I'm worried about Goku. Not Seitan Taisei."

"Aren't you?" he asked neutral.

Hakkai smiled at him--the faintly triumphant look of intellect pulling momentarily ahead in a joyful race against instinct. "You can handle him under ordinary conditions, Sanzo. If the unusual circumstances make things make things worse--I don't think they will, Sanzo; Goku and Kaikara-san are both behaving as though the other isn't quite real--"

"They aren't the only ones," Sanzo droned pointedly.

Hakkai's smile became a bit more fixed. "Sanzo."

"Say my name again, worm," he said flatly.

"How would you like me to apologize?" Hakkai asked uncompromisingly, meeting his eyes squarely. "And really, Sanzo, how would you have preferred me to refuse?"

Caught flatfooted, Sanzo barely managed not to choke or stop dead in the road. He'd very carefully kept from imagining the encounter or guessing who had done what, but somewhere in that fierce disinterest there had been a rock-solid assumption.

After all, he wasn't so foolish as to think that he himself, some quiet night when it was too dark to see the green of youkai eyes, some grey evening when dying leaves floated fiery against the window, when the hiss of rain outside blurred his name to a quiet echo...

Even he might be susceptible, as long as Hakkai didn't say anything desperately stupid.

"Of course," Hakkai said, answering his thoughts. Hakkai's talents did not extend to mind-reading (they were almost sure), so Sanzo must have been being obvious again. Think opaque. "You must know that I would never presume."

Sanzo glared at him. "You trying to say something, asshole?" If Hakkai thought he was going to start stewing over 'missing his chance' or some shit like that, a serious reality check was in order. He just didn't want Hakkai or anyone else thinking about him like that, making comparisons--disgusting.

One long look later, Hakkai nodded once in slow satisfaction and said, "In fact, yes. About Goku. It's Yaone-san I'm concerned with."

Sanzo was only saved from the sour Her, too? that came to his lips by virtue of the reflexive restraint brought on by a lifetime of aggressively not being Gojyo.

Hakkai's eyes narrowed at him anyway..

Sanzo looked back at him flatly, unrepentant.

With an annoyed sigh, Hakkai went on. "I know it was my idea, but--"

"It could only have been your idea," he said dryly. "You'd need wasps in your head."

"Oh, please, Sanzo," Hakkai chuckled, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "Bees, at least."

"If you encourage that idiot to start calling you 'honey,' I'll kill you second," he threatened.

Hakkai laughed, this time without embarrassment and loud enough that everyone turned to look at them suspiciously. "I'll try to be considerate of your feelings," he said gravely.

"Much appreciated," Sanzo drawled, and they smirked a little at each other--quietly, on the inside corners of their faces, so no one else could catch Sanzo having an expression or Hakkai being wicked.

He canted his eyes at where the other healers were having an conversation about the medical uses of ground-up glands. Yaone, at least, seemed enthused. "Are you being more paranoid than usual?" The two of them were usually so tooth-rottingly nice to each other that he kept expecting them to stop fighting and hang a teakettle on her javelin for Hakkai to boil.

Not that Sanzo would have cared if they did. Hakkai's job was to keep the bitch away from him. It didn't matter whether he did it by fighting or exchanging curry recipes, as long as he did it.

"Not at all," Hakkai smiled, with a trace of reproach. "I'm very fond of Miss Yaone, of course, but after all, I'm the one she fights, and so I know her very well."

"But I understand," Hakkai went on in a soothing, sedate tone that had Sanzo eyeing him suspiciously. "At first I was surprised, but when I think about it, it's only natural for Sanzo to miss our bouts, since he's busy keeping an eye on Goku."

Sanzo drew on him.

Into the silence following Gojyo's tiny 'whoa,' Hakkai grinned. It was that very special smile of his; the who-me-evil-oh-never-I'm-much-too-sweet one.

Sanzo took the safety off and locked his arm.

The grin only got wider. Bastard. "Yaone-san's fighting style," Hakkai lectured, his bearing harmless, engaging, and professional, his eyes unbearably smug, "is what I suspect analysts would call 'feminine' or 'moved by yin influence.'"

Sighing, Sanzo put his gun away. He could only handle so many hopeless causes at once.

Why the people around him insisted on taking a simple decision not to kill them yet as encouragement, he could not understand. Hakkai kept talking. "A style like hers is exceptional in two basic ways."

Sanzo shot him a this-had-better-be-fucking-fantastic glare. Everyone was looking at them in more and less obvious fascination. He sighed, and twitched his fingers, and groused, "You may as well."

"Oh, thank you," Hakkai nodded politely. "Yaone-san's style makes two unusual assumptions. First, it assumes that neither the fight nor the fighters are of any importance. That is to say, pride and enjoyment have no meaning when she fights. Victory is her only prize, because she believes that her life and her efforts have no value if they don't accomplish her purpose."

Off to his left, Goku was baffled. To his right, Yaone was blushingly avoiding Kougaiji's gaze.

"Her second assumption is that strength is also of no importance."

To his right, Kanan's face drew into a look of cool, polite, monumentally insulted disbelief. Huh.

Fortunately for them all, it was Kaikara, several meters behind them, who paused in her attempt to gnaw Gojyo's ears off and said, "Huh?"

Hakkai turned to look at her, and the brittle caution in his face melted so fast Sanzo nearly gagged. "I'm sorry, Kaikara-san," he called politely, cupping his hands around his mouth to explain to her how far away she was for civilized conversation. She obligingly started to unhook her ankles from around Gojyo's waist and slide off his back. The kappa straightened up and flicked his hair back in obvious relief, but there was an affectionate crinkle over his scars.

"Disgusting," Sanzo told Hakkai's still, coiled tiger eyes as the girl strolled over. "Would you still have that idiotic look if she were a year older and he groped her on her way down?"

"Gojyo is chivalrous," Hakkai said absently, his eyes hot and deep over the subtle smile of one who intends to ruthlessly pursue an advantage. "There's only room in his heart for one woman, and he's already wearing her favor."

Sanzo eyed him dourly. "Have you tattooed your name on his dick yet?"

"No," was all Hakkai said, still absently.

Sanzo unobtrusively fell back a step.

Kaikara, for her part, looked like she wished she'd stayed put, but it was too late. No one could stop Hakkai from driving a point home, and since that one especially noisy evening when he'd had to drag the backseat boys bodily out of a restaurant, he had lost a good measure of his patience and replaced it with a streak of ruthless melodrama.

Oh, he wouldn't call it that, of course--he'd call it pragmatism or some shit like that. But the result was the same, and lately no one Hakkai felt comfortable enough with to address by name was safe when he wanted to make a demonstration. She'd been doomed from the moment she opened her mouth.

"Oh, yes, Kaikara-san, you had a question." And before she could oh-er-not-really and edge away he had inoffensively laced the fingers of their four hands together. The other monk's shoulders snapped tighter with an ugly creak, and Sanzo didn't blame her. He wouldn't trust Goku to her qi-user's palms either, given the option, but it was the girl's dumbass trust to throw away.

"Push me over," Hakkai suggested in a friendly manner.

Golden dinner-plate eyes lighting, Kaikara gushed, "Are you as strong as Kanan?"

"No," Hakkai said without hesitation, and braced himself. "But I'm as strong as me. Please, do your best, Kaikara-san! Let's both try!"

Off to the side, Gojyo almost discretely aimed a finger down his own throat. Dokugakuji coughed suspiciously, and Kanan was choking on disbelief.

"Really?" the girl squealed excitedly, and they started shoving at each other.

"Fascinating as this promises to be," Kougaiji said dourly, right in Sanzo's ear.

He carefully did not jump. Instead, he snorted and lit up.

"I wouldn't have figured your man for a showoff."

"Hakkai isn't my anything," Sanzo answered flatly, "but you aren't wrong."

"Sanzo, you're so unkind," Hakkai lamented, and while all the walking dead people were sniggering up their sleeves at the noise Sanzo made as he turned his face away (fine, so he was predictable. Up yours, Cho.), he twisted like a lizard and flipped Kaikara hard onto her back.

"Hey!" she protested after a second of shock. "You cheated!"

"I did," Hakkai said cheerfully, looking down at her. "But measuring strength was your purpose, not mine. You were playing a game, but I wasn't. Since I had an important goal, I can live with myself for cheating to obtain it. Sometimes rules and honor aren't very important, when you measure them up against other things. And when you think in this way, strength matters very little."

Kaikara, back on her feet, made a frustrated face at him and sulked back to the blonde.

"That's what you meant?" Sanzo sighed.

Hakkai inclined his head. "Moved by yin influence," he agreed, with an and-there-you-have-it gesture.

"Fuck," Sanzo growled, and he meant it. "This was your fucking idea, Hakkai."

"I have already agreed several times," Hakkai said, a little annoyed, "that we're insane even to consider it. The moment you come up with a better option, please, tell me."

"Fuck," Sanzo snarled again.

"So lost," Gojyo mentioned in a friendly sort of way, coming over to flop a casual arm over Hakkai's shoulders.

"Fuu-uuu-ck," Sanzo moaned in despair and disgust as Hakkai went subtly melty again (well, not that subtly, but it was clearly going over Gojyo's head) and looked around for something to beat his head against. Gojyo's skull, for preference. His schemer in focus when they were about to outrage the space-time continuum--was that too much to ask?

"The sorry excuse for a priest's repeating himself," Gojyo told Hakkai, interested. "Must be a good one--you gonna let me in on it?"

"Not just now," Hakkai said judiciously, but the look he cast up was warm. "I'll share with you later."

Again, right between the kappa's antennae, but Honshin did a double-take.

But then Gojyo leered, "Is that a promise?"

He was obviously joking, but Sanzo exploded on him anyway. Hakkai focused, dammit, God, why not?!

------------------------

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Kenren: The hell? Tenpou, why are you tied to a chair with a scarf I don't own? Is that one of Konzen's? And how come there's two of you?

Hakkai: I resent that. Some of us bathe more than once a week.

(turns around)

(jaw drops)

Tenpou: ^____________^

Kenren: Hey, Tenpou, he's cute!

Hakkai: (purrs) Ne, Gojyo, this is a good look for you... I can see your whole face... And most of your chest...

(pounce)

Kenren: Gyaaaaaaaaa!

Hakkai: But I'm afraid that lumpy skull will have to go...

[end part 15]

Back to index

Chapter 16: Sanzo-Ikkou

WARNING: Language. Angst. Verbosity. Connivance. Shonen-ai.

NOTES: (points) Look! Action! Despite the fact that I can’t write action to save my life. Oh, Almighty Drabble, how I cherish thee... Adore my beta Rune, I was evil to her. Although, come to think of it, no meaner than I’m being to anyone else...

Goku didn't know how Kaikara and Lilin could stand it. Gojyo smelled even more like horny cockroach than usual, but they were both all over him.

Actually a lot of people smelled like erokappa (and what turned out, after getting too close to Honshin and Dokugakuji, to be the female version). About the only people who didn't were Sanzo (the right Sanzo), Kougaiji, and the two girls, but now they smelled like Gojyo, and Sanzo was standing near Hakkai. What use was a good night's sleep if you had to wake up to this?

Goku was staying upwind of everybody.

If anyone had bothered to ask her (ha!), Honshin would have advised them not to touch weeping-willow-man with a ten foot pole and rubber gloves. But you couldn't stop Sanzo from making things worse for herself; she'd just shoot you. Discipline? Stubbornness? Mastering pain through overexposure?

Whatever.

If Sanzo and Kanan wanted to dive headfirst into a river of uncomfortable silences, it wasn't any of Honshin's business. Anyway, Suzuyuki was too small a jeep to hold grudges in for long.

Honshin wasn't interested. A Jien who didn't know what to do with her was more fun than Kanan on morphine.

Was Gonou not the never again right about Yaone-san? Because if he was and he was is no more puddled between cells in the dark the smell of his blood glowing behind her eyes, glowing from his hands, his hands tender but so sure in the dark it was he who'd made her so strong beneath her so obliging washing clean venom vacuumed away oh SHOUTAI, Shoutai so shaken by the right name wrung from her and he slipped away, because the Yaone-san she had met my brother on the road and killed him known was a goddamn shrinking damsel.

A little peace and quiet for fucking once, and if those two were flirting, those two fighting, and these two joined at the hip, at least they were doing it quietly. For small mercies thank no one at all, you nosy hag. Still, it was good. He had enough to do keeping Goku from staring in awe at a worse mess than Goku could have made, because the last thing he needed was Hakkai overcome not only by hormones but squeamish, missish guilt. And besides, the eternal stairs were almost too narrow to swing a harisen no matter who deserved it.

She wasn't sure what Kanan's brother had meant who to understand, but he was almost as mean as Sanzo. At least Kanan explained stuff so you could understand.

Mean or not, she could trust him. She knew she could when he took a metal spoon and ran fire from a lighter and qi over it and poured the chain-lady's knockout medicine she and Goku were supposed to drink into it and held it out to Lilin.

Maybe he was really only looking out for Goku. So what? Sanzo would have smacked Kaikara if she'd failed to benefit. She wasn't complaining.

Shit, he'd been sure they were going to die. Hakkai'd been confusing as hell and it was pissing him off, but when the prince took offense at having his alchemist's integrity questioned, Gojyo learned one more time that terror is a wonderful simplifier.

It was O-Hime-chan who'd talked fast enough to defuse His Royal Temper Tantrum--the first time anyway. Gojyo could almost forgive her a few things for that.

The second tantrum had been uncalled for. Yaone should have been insulted. No way she would have gone through with it once she'd been called on it--not with Lilin at stake.

How encouraging, that Yaone-san should, unlike her lord, have grown enough accustomed to the world to take his assumption of her ruthlessness on Kougaiji-san's behalf as complimentary. After all, someday neither he nor Kougaiji-san would be around to rescue her from her own courage.

And it wasn't as though he'd been wrong. It was unfair of Kougaiji-san, being angry with him for underlining Yaone-san's loyalty just because it went beyond pale honor's strictures.

But if there was a greater indulgence than sulking quietly against Gojyo's shoulder while his older sister defended him one last time, it had to be sin.

The dark stateliness of a pavilion she'd had destroyed mocked her.

This wasn't how she had envisioned matters. The object of sex, as far as she was concerned, was to remind you of the nirvana life wasn't; that the beautiful attachment was a cold illusion inflicted by one's brain in its desperate attempt to keep oxygenated. Bringing the ghost into it had been intended to underline the illusion and illustrate without room for doubt the exact size and position of her place in Kanan's cold, unyielding heart.

And oh, it had.

Sanzo was almost sure she wasn't up to this.

Lashed to a pentacle, iron rubbing old scars through his wristlets, no sunlight at all. No matter how hard it swelled in him, he wouldn't be the first to whimper. He wished Kaikara would. He'd laugh at her and she'd get mad, and then they could fight like she was really him and he was Gojyo and there wouldn't be time to be scared.

She wouldn't, because he wouldn't. So he should, but he wouldn't be first. Gojyo would never let him hear the end of it.

Too sleepy to fight the fear, and Sanzo's hands in his hair.

Lashed to a pentacle, iron rubbing old scars through her wristlets, no sunlight at all. If Homura had tried this when she was awake, she'd have eaten the pervert's ears. Limited or not.

There was no goad, like Homura's voice had been to her sleep, fretting her to anger, only Sanzo, Sanzo's hands in her hair, and from next to Goku Sanzo's deep voice, saying All as it should be, saru, nothing out of place, Goku, you know the world the way it is, Kaikara. Be that way.

Only Sanzo, his deep voice, her small hands moving in Kaikara's hair.

"Hey, I don't know if you yahoos have noticed, but the brats've been jerking like landed fish for a little while now, and hey, how 'bout that, no gateway! We put the sutras down right, right? That's where they were? Corners of the inside star, right? Four sutras and a monkey for two and three gods? We got the power, right? The hell isn't it working? Enlighten us, Oh Genius-Cho-san!"

"Learn some manners, slutroach."

"We're gonna be stuck here, Sanzo! Nothing's happening!"

"Of course not, Sha-san. No one has told it to."

"No one's--haaaaah?"

"Sanzo? If you wouldn't mind?"

Sanzo's why-me snarl was just about worth the price of admission, and the glower afterwards, when Hakkai patiently explained that the Boddhisatva might decline to respond to somebody else's niece, was even better.

Sanzo wasn't buying. Hakkai was the learned scholarly one and shit, and Sanzo damn well wasn't asking the hag for any favors. Gojyo nearly burst something trying not to laugh at Hakkai's dismay.

But the memory that was really gonna keep him warm was Sanzo, standing gingerly as near the borders of the glowing circle as he could get, with Hakkai whispering across it in his ear.

All-powerful Boddhisatva, you who have benefited us in the--Screw it, Hakkai, I left this sanctimonious bullshit back in the temple--no. Get off me. I said back off!

Listen up, Hag! You sent four of us! You're the all-fucking-Merciful One, isn't that right? Bullshit you're gonna steal from another universe to make things easier on us. As if you'd ever do anything to make things easy for us. As if we ever asked you to!

So take the damn power and do whatever the hell you want with it. Unless you like watching the monkeys squirm. I'm sick of this shit.

Another damn lightshow, complete with the crawl of power on her skin and howling Seitan Taisei, scathing them all with whirling dust and whipping hair. She saw Honshin clutch that not-Jien's arm as the alchemist clutched the dead prince, saw her mirror clutch a limiter and grab a monkey's arm just as she did, saw for the last time in her life Kanan kissing someone else, so fiercely the blood ran down their faces, knew she'd find bruises later on Kanan's arms, saw Sha Gojyo turn away.

She saw the glowing doors above them swing open.

The room went black.

He made light.

Sanzo slammed the limiter back around Goku's ears, and some of his satisfaction was 'didn't have to make a new one.' Goku was snoring instantly. The room held eight.

"Got 'im," Gojyo said, unlocked the cuffs, swung Goku over his shoulder, ducked Hakkai's eyes.

"Don’t forget--" Kougaiji began as Sanzo reached for the Maten.

Without hesitation, Hakkai slammed the side of his hand down by Kougaiji’s neck. "We're all tired," he said gently to Yaone-san, handing the prince to his man. "Go home."

"See you soon," Dokugakuji warned.

"Most likely," Hakkai sighed, and followed Gojyo out.

She made light, but let it fizzle out instantly. It was still morning, and the tower was rubble around them. Even as she watched, the great doors, suspended by nothing, fell down with a resounding boom, signing the death warrants of many innocent blades of grass.

Suzuyuki brought them back to the inn, where Sakari was cuddled up in Jien's lap, oversleeping. Kanan lifted her daughter gently, carried her to the next room, and fell asleep before she could hear Honshin greeting her brother. Later, Sanzo climbed in beside her.

And that was the end of that.

Until it wasn't.

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Kenren: #@,@# Oooh… uh, Tenpou, you okay with this?

Tenpou: Taishou, I have a front-row seat. n,n But if you would be so good, as soon as you're finished, if you would kindly click on that link down there...

Kenren: Oh, sure. I can do it now if you want; get it out of the way.

Hakkai: NO! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Tenpou: Damn!

[end part 16]

Back to index

Chapter 17: Cho Sakari (Epilogue 1/2)

WARNING: Language. Angst. Verbosity. Connivance. Pairings in all flavors.

NOTES: The end is nigh. But not yet upon us. --Except on ffnet, where I’ll be posting the final chapter separately if at all, under the name of ‘Goes Without Saying.’ Why? Because I don’t wanna have to up the rating for the whole damn piece, that’s why. So there. (nods) If I lose my nerve, the last chapter will still be findable (within the next few weeks) on my site, my LJ, and EftW.

I know this chapter was a temptation that probably should have been resisted. I apologize (mostly to Tenpou). It was unavoidable.

Sakari couldn't sit still. She knew she was driving Uncle Jien crazy, but she couldn't help it! Mommy had been in with the town's healer for hours now, and Sanzo had been switching off between praying and spitting really filthy curses against pretty boys who were too cover-your-ears-Sakari tragic for their own cover-your-ears-Sakari good.

But she'd thought it was supposed to be a good thing! Everybody was so excited when Mommy started to get fat all those months ago, and then again yesterday evening when she wet herself. Which was confusing, because they'd never been so happy when Sakari used to wet herself forever ago when she was three.

But they had been happy when Mommy did it, and Mommy had growled, "Finally!" Aunt Honshin had taken Honshin and Kaikara out for ice cream and sweet buns to celebrate Mommy not having to waddle around like a walloping hippopotamus anymore. And Sanzo hadn't even smacked Aunt Honshin very hard for calling Mommy a hippopotamus, so Sakari had thought it must be good.

And anyway Mommy had said when she found out (after she turned white and whispered how glad she was she hadn't known about this while they were fighting Gyumaoh) that it was going to be great and Sakari was going to have a brother or a sister to play with and to help raise and it would help her learn to be a mommy someday too.

Sakari had asked if the brother or sister would look just like her and Mommy had said no, it would probably have green eyes and brown hair. So Sakari had been really excited, because if the baby looked like Mommy and she looked like Aunt Honshin then they were going to be really good friends, just like Mommy and Aunt Honshin! And everybody had grinned when she'd said that except Sanzo, and even Sanzo had made a happy kind of snorty-noise.

But that was hours ago, and now everybody was worried. Sakari asked Aunt Honshin if Mommy was going to be all right, and Aunt Honshin said yes because the town healer knew Sanzo would shoot him somewhere painful if he screwed up. And anyway Mommy could fix herself if there was a problem, but there probably wouldn't be one because Mommy had already had Sakari so she knew what to do. When Sakari asked why everyone was so worried, then, she said, "Instinct."

Which was confusing, too, because usually when instinct happened it meant jump out of the way quick there's a crazy youkai behind you! And usually it was right. Aunt Kaikara was really good at instinct and being right about it, and she was worried, too,

Sakari had told Uncle Jien eleven whole times that she couldn't stand it any more before the healer said they could go in. She took a deep breath and pushed herself off his lap and grabbed his hand, and they walked through the door together.

Mommy and Sanzo were arguing. Everything was okay, then.

"Well, I don't know how you explain it," Sanzo was snarling. "I may be only a priest, but even I know sperm doesn't hang around in your tubes for six years. Not even youkai sperm!"

"I don't know how to explain it," Mommy said defensively, cuddling an armful of blanket. Suzuyuki was on her shoulder, her wings half-raised and her red eyes fixed angrily on Sanzo. "I told you that, Sanzo. It doesn't make any sense to me either."

She had to talk over Sanzo, who clearly wasn't going to stop growling anytime soon. "Mommy, can I see the baby?"

"--Anh? Oh, Sakari-chan! Yes, of course, Come sit here."

"Is she a girl?"

"Yes... here, support her head like that. Sanzo, shut up."

"The only explanation that makes any sense--"

"Whether it makes sense or not, it isn't true! I haven't let anyone but you and Gonou touch me since that dead--cover your ears, Sakari-chan."

"Mommy, she looks like me and Aunt Honshin!"

"Yup," Uncle Jien said. "I guess she's going to be pretty, then."

Sakari thought he was hoping too much, because the baby wasn't pretty now. Even if it was Sakari's favorite color, Sakari didn't think a person should be all the same color. Crimson was pretty for hair and eyes, but not for skin. And she was lumpy and there was smelly yuk in her swirl of hair, which she had even less of than Sanzo or Uncle Jien. Sakari wanted to cuddle her anyway,

Sanzo sent Uncle Jien a really nasty look and said, "Any male youkai in the vicinity would be well advised to shut the--"

"Cover your ears, Sakari!"

"--up and stay out of my way."

"Oi," Uncle Jien said mildly. "A little credit for intelligence, please? For lack of death-wish? For liking my--cover your ears, Sacchan--where they are? Anyway, Kanan's not my type. No offense, kiddo."

"None taken," Mommy said graciously. "Since you are--taken, I mean--and oh, my! How shocking, I just remembered! So am I! Only think, Sanzo! How careless of me to forget!"

"Well, you're not going to tell me that came out of your brother!"

"Don't call my sister a that," Sakari said reproachfully. "She's a her. And she's all soft and red and even if she isn't pretty she's my sister and she's not a that."

"Good girl," Uncle Jien said, clapping her on the arm, and came down to whisper, "Babies always look like that. She'll get over it."

"...Promise?"

"She had to have, Sanzo," Mommy said, exasperated. "There hasn't been anyone else. Honshin!"

Aunt Honshin froze in the doorway with a cautious expression on. Warily, she asked, "I reeeeeeeeally don't want to walk into this one, do I?"

"Nope," Uncle Jien said, and reached out a long arm to reel her in.

"Run while you can!" Aunt Honshin yelled behind her. To Aunt Kaikara, Sakari guessed.

"Honshin, how many times have you sworn upside down and sidewise that you can always tell when someone's been getting a little on the side?"

"Er--you want me to count?"

"No, thank you. And she's always right, Sanzo, isn't she?"

"Well?" Sanzo demanded, glaring at Honshin.

"Uh--well what?"

"Has she?"

Aunt Honshin gaped, outraged. Her fingers twitched, and she said, "Cover your ears, sweetie."

Sakari scowled. This looked like it was going to be good. But everybody thundered at her, "Cover your ears!" So she did.

When Aunt Honshin was finished screaming at Sanzo and Sakari was allowed to listen again and the baby had stopped shrieking, Sanzo said, almost mildly, "So that's a no?"

"YES, THAT'S A NO!" Aunt Honshin bellowed, and Sakari giggled. Uncle Jien looked like he wanted to laugh, too, but Sanzo would have hit him, so he didn't.

Sanzo snapped, "Then let the genius kappa with her wide, wide experience explain it. The man was her brother. He was not a youkai."

"He wasn't really my brother, Sanzo," Mommy said, sounding irked. "He was more like me. I told you that. He told you that."

"If he could've been born male, why not youkai?" Uncle Jien shrugged easily.

"He didn't look youkai," Sanzo muttered, turning almost the baby's red color. It didn't look any better on her.

"Could he have been wearing a limiter?"

"Anyway, wouldn't Sanzo or Kaikara have felt it if he were?" Mommy asked.

"Not with the dumbape and that Goku kid on my--ears, Sakari--all the time," Sanzo scoffed, looking thoughtful. "I couldn't even feel the Lirin brat when they were anywhere around."

After a moment, Mommy said, "Lord Heaven. Those stupid earcuffs--Sanzo, he never took them off! Let's go back. I'm going to skin him and possibly pull his lungs out of his back. And then perhaps a light saute--some sort of vinegar marinade, I should think, only with lots of salt... That should teach him to make subtle hints."

"Can I learn to make subtle hints?" Sakari asked, interested.

"NO!"

"But it doesn't make sense," Aunt Honshin frowned. "I mean, he wasn't half'an'half, so if he was youkai he was full youkai. And if he was a full youkai, how come he wasn't crazy? You gotta have some human in you to not get Minused. That's what keeps you and me safe from the Wave, chibi-chibi," she said to Sakari. "If our mommies hadn't been human, we'd be just as psycho as all those other youkai."

"What about Aunt Kaikara?" Sakari asked. "Isn't she youkai?"

"Not really--she's something called itan. We just call her youkai because it's simpler," Mommy explained.

"Oh. Well, what about Uncle Jien?"

"That's a plot hole, sweetie," Aunt Honshin said firmly, "and we don't talk about it."

"Oh," Sakari said, confused.

"Well, how can a youkai be part human without being a half-breed?" Aunt Honshin asked with an air of getting back on topic.

"Well," Uncle Jien said, "there is that old legend..."

"What, you mean the Changeling? Eeeyugh!"

"What's a changeling?" Sakari asked, poking at the baby to make her giggle.

"Someone," Mommy said, "who kills a thousand youkai and becomes youkai himself."

"Didn't you kill a thousand youkai, Mommy?"

"Well, yes," Mommy said, a little helplessly, "but not by hand. Not one by one. No one could do it. It's impossible."

"I bet we've killed that many," Aunt Honshin said perkily. "Prolly each of us has."

"But he's a qi-user, like me," she protested. "There isn't any blood to bathe in!"

"Ew," Sakari said, carefully pulling a caterpillar out of the air for her new sister to play with. She could make inchworms, too, and all kinds of cute, fuzzy centipedes, but Mommy liked the caterpillars best, and then you had butterflies later. "Who'd wanna take a bath in blood? It smells!"

"It's not very satisfying without blood, I always think," Aunt Honshin said dreamily, and Uncle Jien looked alarmed and edged away from her.

"She has a point," Sanzo said, and Aunt Honshin pretended to die of shock, reeling back against Uncle Jien so he couldn't escape. "The kickback can compensate, but there's really nothing like feeling a rib cage cave in under your hand..."

"I'm with Sakari-chan," Mommy said, pulling both her daughters closer. "Ew."

"But what if you hadn't been the one they came for?" Sanzo said with a ruthless look. "I know you."

"You'd do it for Sacchan," Uncle Jien said.

"Of course, if I had to," Mommy said with that tiger-in-the-grass flash of her green eyes that always made Sakari feel safe.

"Bet you'd do it for bouuuuuuuuuuzo," Aunt Honshin taunted.

"I wouldn't have to," Mommy said demurely. "Sanzo can take care of herself."

"Bet you'd have done it for book-boy," she said, more softly. "I bet he did it for you."

After a moment's sober silence that Sakari didn't understand at all, Mommy gave a bright, watery smile and said, "Ah. Of course. The direct approach."

OMAKE!

The SEME At The End Of This Fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU

Hakkai: RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Tenpou: Damn!

Kenren: (annoyed) Oi...

Tenpou: (very cheerful) Well, no matter. You may as well return to your duties.

Kenren: (big grin) Yes, sir. With pleasure.

Tenpou: ...Aren't you going to untie me, General?

Kenren: Submitted respectfully, Marshal--no.

Tenpou: ...Good answer.

[end part 17]

Back to index

Chapter 18: Gojyo: Goes Without Saying [2/2]

WARNING: 85. Meaning, two guys expressing their affection in a physical kind of way. Also, I didn’t realize this until months after it was written, but there may be some (kinda fluffy) d/s here. Otherwise known as, Hakkai has a point to make. Fear the sensei.

He woke to liquid electricity at his breast, so intense he couldn't pin it down to pain or pleasure. There was cold metal pressed to his lip, and a weight on top of him so solid and angular that his first real thought was a panicked Who did we lose to?!

But then it came to him, as he froze and tried to pretend he hadn't woken, that the ground underneath him had a definite give to it,. Something soft was draped over his legs, and the air on his face and arms was cooler than everywhere else. Besides that, the limp body on top of him was hot and pliant, scooped stomach shifting tranquilly against him with each quiet breath. Strong legs were twined around one of his. One large, graceful hand was curled around his wrist, the other wrapped around his upper arm, a limited ear was brushing his mouth, and Hakkai was making love to his nipple in his sleep.

And he'd thought the night before had been hell.

He left his left hand where it was, since first of all it was kind of pinned and secondly Hakkai wouldn't have gotten upset about a hand on his arm even under ordinary circumstances. But when he figured out where his other hand was, he knew it was going to have to move before Hakkai woke up. Making 'fix my lousy karma' his mantra, he unlocked his fingers from their posessive grip on the object of his affections and swept it up, up, over the lavander nightshirt and across the valleyed spine and onto another warm, sweet swell, this one almost better because he could card his fingers through soft, dark hair.

He craned his neck low and opened his mouth against the ear with the intention of making Hakkai come alive on top of him. In a perfect world that would have involved hot breath and a stabbing tongue, but instead he only said, for the second time in his miserable life, "Hakkai. Hakkai, wake up; I'm still not Kanan."

There was a flutter of eyelashes against his chest, and he had to fight not to grind his hips up against a sleek pelvis as a low vibration purred, "Uhnnnmh?" against him.

"I'm not Kanan, babe," he said sympathetically, letting his hand slip comfortingly down that long neck. "Come on, wake up."

"I know that," Hakkai mumbled with husky, heavy annoyance, and bit down on him in sleepy retribution.

He froze, and not just because of the sharp jolt that detoured straight through his heart before zipping down to its ultimate destination. "You... Huh? You ehwhat?"

"You're too tall and too hard and your qi is opinionated," Hakkai explained, neither patiently nor coherantly. His voice was still bleary. "I always know who's touching me, Gojyo."

"Oh," he said, and because his brain had frozen, his stupid mouth, running on autopilot, complained, "I am not too tall."

"You are if you're Kanan."

"Well, I'm not."

"Clearly."

His mouth smirked under dazed eyes. "You always get this terse in your sleep?"

"Mmmf," Hakkai grunted and pushed his face into Gojyo's chest, tightening his grip in a manner that firmly indicated his intention to go back to sleep.

But Gojyo's brain was slowly coming unstuck. "Hakkai..." he said slowly.

"Nhn?"

"Say that again."

"Clearly?"

"No. No, say her name."

"Ka-nan," Hakkai enunciated, really annoyed now, and nothing else there at all.

Nothing.

"Oh, damn," he whispered, his eyes peeling open so far he would have been afraid they'd fall out, if he'd had any whimsy to spare for it. "Lord Heaven up in the sky."

"Gojyo..."

"O-hime-chan," he crowed, a silly grin stretching his mouth so wide it hurt, "you bitch, I'll love you for this!"

"...Fine. Wake me again when you're sane, please."

"You're better!" he whooped, and flipped them over.

"Gojyo!" Hakkai managed to get out before he couldn't talk anymore because his mouth was full.

"Oh, god," he breathed, pressing the words into Hakkai's slack, astonished mouth, feeling it wake beneath him, clinging soft and warm and a little bit chapped from dry spring air whipping around the windshield. "I'll love her for this, 'Kai, swear I will, won't call her names any more, won't even think them..."

"How nice?" Hakkai ventured, astonished eyes wide between the rough hands that cupped them, his own hands plastered in passive shock over Gojyo's lower back, right where they belonged. "I've very pleased for you both?"

"She fixed you!" he explained, beaming. This did not go over well; there was a flat, unimpressed look under the arched, brushstroke eyebrows until he imprinted a last, fervent kiss between them. The look had softened a bit and taken on a faint air of amusement when he pulled back from it, so he sprawled onto an elbow, still grinning, and purred into Hakkai's temple, "Was it the sex?"

"Gojyo," Hakkai said one more time with a ticklish little exasperated wriggle, finally starting to chuckle. He did not, to Gojyo's disappointment, blush. "Of course not. That," he added earnestly, not at all like a big fat liar, "was for her."

"Suuuuuuuure it was," Gojyo teased, poking him in the ribs and getting a laugh for his trouble.

"Well, all right," Hakkai admitted, still unembarassed. "Mostly for her."

"So what was it?" he pressed, pulling him sideways into an iron cuddle with his poking hand, ending with it splayed right above a hip, right where he wanted to be, pressing his nose into that short-cropped nape. Clean hair and soft skin and just a spicy hint of dragon, which made him chuckle silently against the knob of vertebra he was going to drive wild as soon as he was answered.

Hakkai let out a breath of laughter, just one, and shouldered him backwards in a satisfied stretch that left them spooned at diagonals, Gojyo's elbow supporting them both. He loved those soft, shapeless sweatpants, the perfect tease. They needed to be gone. But then Hakkai flipped, not taking Gojyo with him, just wriggled until he was on his front again and nestled in so they were back where they'd started.

"Kanan relied on me to protect her," he said slowly, stroking an absent thumb over Gojyo's collarbone. "She was taken from under my roof, in my absence, and she could do nothing. I thought if I had been there..."

"You are an arrogant sonofabitch sometimes," Gojyo agreed peaceably, petting lazily down his back. He wanted the shirt gone, too, no matter how thin it was. It was more of a tease than the pants, and he could feel the hot reaching for him from under it.

"Well, yes," Hakkai smiled ruefully, tilting his head up to look at him with troubled eyes. "But that isn't it, not really. I thought if I had known, if I had been there--not even me, really, just anyone, anyone who would fought for her, and who else was that? You understand? A woman alone, a sweet woman who wanted to believe the best of the world, who refused to learn to protect herself, who refused to live in a world where she had to... She was naïve. She chose to be, she made that choice deliberately and I loved her for it, but she was. I never was, and I thought if I had been there..." He shrugged.

"No?"

"No. That other Gonou... You know what a woman can be when she wants to take care of you."

"Who needs a woman; I know you," he growled, and got a wide smile back. "You saying he was whipped?"

"I'm saying he came home when he was supposed to come home. He didn't dawdle, and he was there when they came for her."

"Wasn't much help, huh?"

"She fought them, Gojyo. Maybe she and I could hold off a town now, but she doesn't think even together we could have done it then."

"Ah."

"But it's Kanan, really," he said meditatively. "I allowed myself to forget that it was her choice. It was always her choice. Not that, I don't mean that. Later. She was like Homura; she wanted the world a certain way."

"Some people can't adapt."

"Some people choose not to bend. You and I... we may be the weaker parties. We may fight change, but in the end we take what we're given, we learn to live with it."

"You think that's weak?"

"Not really. Different. But really, why should we? If life is good, why let it change?"

"Cause that's life."

"But why should it be?"

"Because it is."

"Some people won't accept that answer, Gojyo. Goku wouldn't. No one could take Sanzo from him; he wouldn't let them. Kanan loved to love the world that much."

"Or maybe there's just one thing," Gojyo thought out loud, flattening his hands over Hakkai's tapered back. "Maybe everybody's just got one thing they can't lose, once they find it."

"She was Gonou's," Hakkai said softly. "I was arrogant. I thought I was hers."

"It's not always a person, babe," he said, and dropped his lips on the even paler place where the green bandana wasn't, at the moment.

"No, it's not." Hakkai said slowly. "But I don't think that's it, Gojyo. Not 'one thing.' When you have faith, faith in anything... you give yourself to the world. A piece of you."

"Or when you love," he sighed, and Hakkai reached up, feathered moth fingers over his scars, because Hakkai was just psychic like that sometimes.

"Or then, even if it's foolish," he agreed. "You say 'take,' and sometimes it takes away, and the rest of you re-forms."

"It hurts like hell. Even if you know better."

"Even when it's just a small piece. It is hell. Birth, rebirth, this world, all of them."

Gojyo snorted, partially just from hearing that word come out of that mouth in that resigned, comtemplative voice. "I don't think heaven's any better, Hakkai. Not according to Homura."

"No. It's yourself you have to live with, and the things you claim in exchange for yourself. The decision, whether it's worth it..."

"You couldn't make it for her."

"She never asked what I would have chosen."

Fuck, Gojyo thought, an astonished smile spreading out, he's finally angry. At the right person, finally. He wrestled with himself until he could swallow it, made his voice easy. "I'd ask," he said lightly.

Hakkai was smiling again. "Would you?" he asked, wistful, amused. "I don't think so."

"Well... nah, you're right. I wouldn't bother. I know what you'd say."

"Mm."

"You'd say, you must stick around and entertain me, Sha Gojyo, because you are the incomparable Sha Gojyo!"

"Aa," Hakkai said gravely, and how he managed it while shaking with silent laughter was something Gojyo would never understand. "That's it exactly; how well you understand me."

"Don't kid yourself, 'kai," he said, more gently. "She knew it, too. She had to. Why else would you have come? But I'd trust you to make it worth it."

Hakkai sighed out a meditative, "Mmf," and his fingers rapped uneasily on Gojyo's chest. "That's a quite a lot to live up to."

"You can handle it," Gojyo assured him fondly, which was a dig in the ribs Hakkai thoroughly deserved. If Hakkai always knew who he was touching, then Hakkai was the most machinating, dishonest, deck-stacking cheat Gojyo had ever been bewitched head over heels for. "Hey, Hakkai, would you trust me?"

Hakkai arched incredulous eyebrows at him. "What an astonishing question, Gojyo," he smiled, looking perplexed. "I can't understand why you'd bother to ask."

"Maybe I just wanna hear you admit it," he leered, warmed that Hakkai trusted him to hear the 'at this late date' on the end of that.

The eyebrows arched, if possible, even higher. "What is it exactly you want to hear, Gojyo?" Hakkai asked, amused. "'I do'?"

Gojyo shivered at the most terrifying words in the language poured over him. "You say the scariest shit sometimes, 'Kai," he objected plaintively. It wasn't fair for something that horrifying to get this kind of a reaction from him. Or maybe it was just that someone's voice was hardwired into his nervous system. Still, there were certain things a self-respecting playboy was supposed to twitch at in a bad way, no matter who was saying them. But he'd known for a long time that he was in trouble.

"Well, you're free to run away, if you like," Hakkai said, as though it didn't matter in the least, and also as though he wasn't pinning Gojyo to the mattress and, therefore, lying through his pretty teeth again.

"Nah," he shrugged. "Sounds good when you say it."

"Does it?"

"Real good," he admitted, humping up lazily to prove it. Just about anything sounded good, when Hakkai was saying it. This sounded better.

"Oh, my," Hakkai said placidly, starting to rap at Gojyo's chest again, this time with intention. "I suppose it must, then. Which is just as well, really."

"Oh?"

"Yes; I must admit that it feels good to say, as well."

"Say it again, then," he suggested, all innocent cunning. He was a brat, of course, but Hakkai seemed to like him anyway. "Tell me you're mine, babe. Go on."

"Oh, well, if you insist," Hakkai shrugged lazily. Gojyo had just enough time to think Oshit.

And then strong hands were slamming his wrists up above his head and clear, uncompromising jungle eyes (how the fuck did the man move that fast?) were burning into his. Some part of him had always wanted to get between Hakkai's legs, but not like this, lower down, please, and god, that man needed to eat more, because he could feel every pelvic tendon straining across his somersaulting stomach even through the sweatpants.

It was a vicious whisper that he recognized as Hakkai's only because it ripped right through him that hissed, "You're mine."

Afterwards, he would swear upside-down and sideways that it was the savage, possessive kiss that invaded all the way to the back of his skull and right up to the top of his brain that undid him. Hakkai would smile agreeably and nod placatingly, but in fact Gojyo didn't last long enough to feel it before the world short-circuited, and they both knew it.

He woke to liquid electricity, so intense he couldn't even locate it. He was breathing in stutters, and all his muscles were fluttering, and there was something shocky and sputtery about his straining ache that told him it wasn't still, it was again. He was also naked, and the blankets were gone. He tried to say something, but all he could manage was a high, desperate, disbelieving sound.

"Ah, you're awake," Hakkai said mildly, and he made the noise again because those were Hakkai's cool hands holding his thighs apart, Hakkai's teeth scraping experimentally against an in-between place he didn't even know the word for. "I'm afraid I'm going to need to wash my clothes in the morning," he went on, in a calm, everyday, 'I would make you take responsibility for this if I weren't tolerant' voice, but he was saying it right into the backs of two of Gojyo's very best friends, his voice buzzing them until they squirmed mindlessly.

Did you take them off, he tried to ask about the clothes, but he couldn't get past the first eager syllable.

Hakkai understood him anyway, snaked up without touching to kiss the startled inside of his knee, smiled against it, gnawed softly at the tendon with his warm lips and mouthed it, and drew a chastising finger vaguely in the direction he wanted it to go, the evil bastard. "I believe you would prefer to speculate," he explained, all helpful and reasonable.

And damn if he wasn't right.

"Hakkai," he finally managed to choke, half-chuckling from sheer, shocky lightheadedness, "You're going to put me clean out of my--"

"Mine," Hakkai hissed again, right into the back of his knee, and dug his teeth in again, careful but absolutely implacable.

"Ogod," he gasped as all his blood made a hurried southerly migration, digging the top of his head into the pillow. "Right, okay, you're the boss."

"Yeff," Hakkai agreed complacantly around his mouthful, his lips stretching wide again against the two inches of Gojyo's skin that might still have been virginal until just then. Was there any reason besides this for there to be so many nerves behind the knee? His tongue was doing something really odd.

""H-Hakkai, is that a rose?" he asked incredulously.

That was a mistake, because Hakkai opened his mouth and raised his head to beam down at him in approval. "Biiiingo!" he chirped. "Well, a peony, actually, but that was very well done, Gojyo! Most people would find it difficult to distinguish--"

"You are bizarre," Gojyo informed him, because somebody had to tell the guy sometime. "Also weird. And diabolical."

"Aa," Hakkai smiled, with that cute squinty-eyed face of his, and he was tracing over that rose or whatthehellever it was with his short nails. "That's it exactly. How well you understand me."

"Do I get to ask why?" he asked warily. "I mean, a peony?"

"Don't you like them?" Hakkai asked, opening his eyes all round with surprise. "Perhaps something else, then?"

"Bizarre," Gojyo repeated firmly, sighing.

"It seems that even now you're goal-oriented," Hakkai said mournfully, and lowered his head again to worry at the side of his knee. "And tense," he added severely. "If I may ask, Gojyo, what is the point of all these affairs if they don't even serve to relax you?"

"Asks the guy who just got laid last night," he drawled.

"If you really believe it's the same thing..."

"Nah," he admitted. "'Sjust I'd've thought, I mean, from last night isn't long enough to forget the feeling."

"Mm," Hakkai said noncommittally, and sat there quietly.

After a few increasingly tense seconds, Gojyo blurted, "Shit, you aren't still waiting for me to tell you a fucking flower, are you?"

"Is that not your game, Gojyo?"

Unbefuckinglievable. No distressed 'maa maa' or any steering wheel between his hands was going to save Hakkai from a fight if this wasn't just force of habit, and come to think of it, he didn't even want to go anywhere near that train of thought. "The hell do you think you're with?"

"Hm? --Ah, of course. We'll try another, then," he shrugged, and retreated.

For a moment, Gojyo thought he was going to get lucky, but then a hot mouth closed over the side of his foot, right at the height of the arch.

"So I'm guessing you're a leg man," he said weakly, jolts shooting through him as it worked.

"Not especially," Hakkai admitted, and went back to nipping between his toes. "If I were," bite, "to chose some third portion of your anatomy to focus on, Gojyo," he went on, between digging in with his tongue, "in preferance to all the others, I suspect that it would have," sucking, sucking on his big toe and scraping lightly at the edge of the nail, thank the jade emperor he'd taken a bath today, "to be your nape."

"My which?!"

"Exposed once," Hakkai said cheerfully, "and not forgotten." A firm nuzzle right in the middle of the sole, and Gojyo stopped jerking like a landed trout and collapsed, limp and trembling, on the mattress. Did Hakkai mean...? "I think I'll save that for another time," he said thoughtfully. "Since you've been reserving it, I shouldn't take it for granted or rush matters. I'm suited; there's no hurry."

"No?" he gasped. "You sure you're human?"

"Not at all," Hakkai chuckled.

"You know what I--aaa! you know what I--oh, 'Kai, that's nice... I mean, you-ooooooh."

"I do, but I still see no reason not to pace myself," Hakkai said reasonably. He dug his thumbs into the give of muscle right between Gojyo's arch and the bottom of his heel, and Gojyo thought later that he'd probably put a touch of qi into it, because heat exploded not only there but also between his legs. He nearly exploded himself, shooting completely involuntarily into a half-seated position, when Hakkai pressed his lips to the same place and said in his 'I cannot be argued with' voice, "After all, you aren't going anywhere."

"You sure about that?" Gojyo demanded. His eyes were squeezed shut on hot black and he was rocking on his tailbone, felt so good, building the ache, and maybe he just wanted to make him say it again.

Hakkai smiled into his foot, because Hakkai was just psychic like that sometimes, and as he bit down hard in that perfect place with the direct connection, he was saying, "Yes. Mine."

Gojyo moaned so high it was almost a shriek and curled up around him, reaching desperately for something to get his hands on. "Oh, god, there you are, you did," he gasped as his fingers landed on slick, bare shoulders, slid down hard arms, petted desperately up them, trying to draw him higher. It wasn't as though Hakkai's bare shoulders were exactly unfamiliar territory; they'd all been in baths together and so on, but that made it worse. He knew exactly what the muscles under his hands looked like, so why were they hiding all they way down there? "Come up here, babe, please, 'Kai, wanna feel you..."

"No," Hakkai scolded as though he should have known better, and pushed him away. "No need to rush, I said. Another time."

"Lord in the sky, Hakkai!" he panted, because after four years he could tell when his friend was being an insecure jackass with the self-esteem of a small pinecone. "Of course there's gonna be another time, don't you believe yourself?"

"I prefer to reserve insurance," Hakkai said politely.

"You have no faith in me," he grumbled.

"In you if anyone, but my store is limited, I'm afraid," he confessed conversationally. "Still, do you really think so? If I really had no faith in you, Gojyo, if I couldn't believe in your sincerity, if I thought this was my only chance..."

He paused to shift position, and started lapping and nuzzling at what really should have been a random place on Gojyo's leg. It was four inches above the knee, just above where his legs would have pressed together, and there was no reason that Gojyo knew of for it to warm him all the way up to the chest or make him shift restlessly because no one was cupping his ass.

"If I thought that, I would take the most I could get right away." He moved to the outside of the leg, a little farther, down, but kept rubbing the place in comforting circles with two fingers.

"What would you do?" he asked breathlessly.

"I'd be in you already," he said with that debilitating frankness he liked to use as a sneaky secret weapon sometimes. "In you, beneath you, skin to skin, all over."

"Keep talking," he said. Whined, really, because Hakkai had abandoned his knee, had pressed his leg up higher and was lazily licking all down the back of it, heading for his hips.

"Oh?" he purred, pausing halfway down.

"Yeah, oh, you bastard." Gojyo had to smile. "Come on, Hakkoi, talk to me."

"I see," Hakkai murmurred in a solemn voice that was pure happiness, rubbed his whole soft face against him (maybe shaving before bed was a good idea after all), breathed him in, and went on. "I would have to make the occasion something to live off," he explained, "and so I would be sure to remember all of you in my hands."

"God, I love your hands," he sighed wistfully, wanting to lick their palms badly and knowing it wasn't going to happen anytime soon. It was, as a statement, woefully inadequate. Anyone's hands could be as strong, or competant, or well-formed, or graceful. Hakkai's hands were food and warmth on cold nights, motion and comfort and bright, ruthless destruction.

"Mnh." He got a soothing stroke over his humming shins for his pains, and Hakkai went on. "I'd be in you by now, but it wouldn't do you any good, Gojyo."

"It wouldn't?" That, as a statement, was patantly ridiculous.

"No." There was a nasty, smirky sound to that, and he waited anxiously until Hakkai explained in his evil innocent voice, "I'm not a high-ranking priest, you know. My bracers weren't tailor-made for my wrists and mine alone. They're adjustable."

It took Gojyo a minute to process this, what it meant, what Hakkai was proposing. Slowly, he breathed, "Ohmigod. You mean--"

"I suspect they can become rather smaller than they would have to be," Hakkai said peacefully, and you had to know him really, really well to hear the leer in it, "to constrain you. I would require you to hold back, you know, Gojyo. If I were to only have you once, I would require my own turn as well."

"Omigod," he squeaked as that image dove behind his eyes and took up housekeeping.

"Will you be able to look at them now, Gojyo?" he asked sweetly.

"Look at 'em hell, I'm gonna steal 'em," he retorted. "You can't hog the sex toys, Hakkai! Who's the resident lech around here, anyway?"

"It seems you aren't in a position to ask that question," Hakkai corrected him politely, and started working the backs of his legs again, heading back for the knees.

"I'll take it back if you head the other way," he suggested hopefully.

Tilted green eyes popped up between his legs, framing what saluted them, and he almost came again right then. "Are you asking me to?" Hakkai asked curiously.

"I'm asking with a please and a thank-you-god and I'll throw in a kowtow or two if you want," he admitted. It would have been useless to try to play cool when somebody's hands were the only thing stopping him from writhing all over the bed.

"Oh, my!" Hakkai was laughing at him silently. Ordinarily he'd have killed anyone who tried that, but it was so warm and Hakkai, it just raised his temperature another notch or two. "So polite, Gojyo! If you ask like that, how can I refuse?"

"How 'bout not at all?"

"Although I think we can save the kowtowing. Another time, perhaps."

"You're trying to kill me here," he accused plaintively. He hoped it didn't sound like an actual complaint, though, because that warm tongue had obligingly gone back to what it was doing. In the right direction this time, too, if slowly, tracing lazy, loving curves and flickering diagonals and... "Are you writing something?" he asked suspiciously.

"Please permit me my own amusement," Hakkai requested. Gojyo could hear him beaming, and it was a wicked silence.

"Hell if I care," he shrugged, bemused. "Long as it's for your eyes only, babe."

"It would be in any case," returned Hakkai, and that implacable note was back. Even Gojyo's wrists were humming now.

"Hey," he managed, "if I let you do your weird tongue-grafitti on my skin, can I ask a question?"

Hakkai's face appeared again, and this time the amusement in his eyes was saying, 'you just said that to hear it out loud.' Which was exactly right, and it gave Gojyo blissful goose-pimples that he knew it. "I suppose."

"Will you please, please, pleeeeeeeeease," he whined, shifting his legs restively as far as he could, "please move your hands?"

"Yes," Hakkai answered at once, and he was just blowing out a sigh of relief when the bastard finished with a thoughtful, "Only not just now."

"You're an insecure jackass, you sadistic, monkish bastard," Gojyo swore, banging his bead back against the pillow again and beating his fists helplessly against the mattress for good measure, because he had to do something.

"In a moment, perhaps," Hakkai went on, as though no one had spoken. "When I arrive."

"Now you're just being nasty," he sighed, resigned.

"Oh? Is this nasty?" It was arch-voice, and it got followed up by a swipe of hot tongue that made him jerk, right where his thighs stopped being legs, and then a long nothing.

"No," he said from between gritted teeth, "you have now graduated to evil. Congratulations."

"Gojyo, you're too kind! Do I get a diploma?" Hakkai asked, sounding bright and interested.

"No!"

"Pity. I've always wanted one. I suppose it isn't fair to ask without completing an essay..."

"Hey!" he protested. "A couple of characters, okay. You go ahead and play your weird mind-games with yourself, I don't mind. But if you compose a fucking essay on me, I'm finishing without you."

"I wouldn't need to compose it, Gojyo," Hakkai laughed, three goddamn inches two low. High. Something. What the hell was he talking about? "Still, I don't wish to be unreasonable. A poem, perhaps? Something short, by Li Bai? A haiku?"

"Another time," Gojyo mocked him. He was hurting, dammit!

Silence.

"Hakkai?"

Silence.

"'Kai? Did I--"

"Say it again," Hakkai said flatly. His voice was so empty of anything but imperative he almost sounded like Sanzo.

It made Gojyo want to cry, or pull him up and cuddle him or drop kisses on his luminescant brow or some mushy shit like that. Instead he said, argumentatively, "I said you're an insecure jackass, jackass. With the self-esteem of a small pinecone."

"A pinecone?" That was more like Hakkai's voice.

"Yeah, I was proud of that one."

"Unusual imagery, certainly." Hakkai mused, smiling again.

"Pulled it right outta my ear a couple minutes ago."

"Whole minutes? So patient, Gojyo!" He was definitely getting laughed at again now. "I'm impressed."

"Well, you want me to be patient, right? Goes both ways, 'Kai. You can do your poem thing next time. Or the time after that, or the time after that, or hell, ten years from now if it makes you happy. Sound good?"

Silence again, but this time he wasn't worried.

"Very good," Hakkai agreed fervently, almost whispering, and his fingers started a dazed, dizzying stroking. In almost the same, sacred tones, he said, "Gojyo?"

"Nhngh?"

"I'm going to move my hands now."

"Othankgod."

"I'm just going to put them somewhere else," he was warned. "But then I'm not going to need them."

"You aren't?" he asked faintly.

"No. Do you imagine that this is easy for me, either?"

"I'm guessing the answer is no, but if you're doing this to me," he managed to make a weak gesture with one hand, "and not even getting off on it, you're seriously hurting my pride."

"It's because you're wrong that it's difficult," Hakkai said wryly, which was so sweet that he didn't have an answer for it. "But, you see, I want you to take this seriously."

"Hakkai," he said flatly, exasperated. "You're torturing me here. You've laughed at me from between my fucking legs, you aren't even letting me touch you, I'm letting you live and even going along with it, and you think there's even a chance I'm not serious?"

"I am coming to that conclusion," Hakkai conceded judiciously. "But I'm not the one who needs convincing."

"Oh, for--"

He didn't get any farther than that, though, because before he'd finished speaking Hakkai had kept his word. The hands behind his knees struck like shakujou, sliding down and washing over his butt briefly on their way to pull his whole lower body up and hold him there by the hips. His legs were going anywhere; Hakkai didn't even bother to balance them on his shoulders; and all around him was cool air except for the two burning hands supporting him.

"Do you know what I see when I look at you?" he asked.

Gojyo, too far gone to joke, interrupted his hyperventilation to gasp out, "Blood?"

"Blood is blue," Hakkai said inexorably. "Blood and air together are red. Blood and air together are life." He let that sink in for a minute, and said, "Yes, you're blood, Gojyo. The body can't live without it. The brain starves, the heart grows still. Blood is heat." He pressed a hard thumb to Gojyo's sacrum, and the quiet throbbing of that pulse, half a beat behind his own, made him suck in a sobbing breath. "Do you feel my blood, Gojyo? I see yours. I see you."

"Kai--'Kai, please..."

"What I see, Gojyo--never mind the what. It's what's real. I don't see anyone else when I look at you, not anymore. I never wanted to. No ghosts, no masks. Nothing can keep me from seeing you, or knowing you."

"I'll love her," he moaned again, and that was the closest he was going to get right then to making sense.

"I know you," Hakkai repeated, crowding in close, vibrating into that in-between place again, and he finally did let Gojyo's legs down to rest on him, sliding his hands farther down the kappa's back to take some of the weight off this neck and shoulders. "You're what I see. You're what I want. I don't let go what's mine, Gojyo. You know that."

"You can't do this to me twice!" he wailed, turning his head violently to one side and clenching the sheets so hard he could feel his own short fingernails through them.

"I could," Hakkai said darkly. "I could without touching you at all. Perhaps I ought to, Gojyo. Certainly you would understand, if I did."

"So explain it to me! I'm a hands-on kind of student, right?"

"But I've already explained, Gojyo-kun. Perhaps at this juncture I should be testing your comprehension."

"Well get to it, then, sensei, because at that juncture--" he pointed, "--all you're testing is my endurance."

"But Gojyo," Hakkai said patiently, with a dutiful smile for the pun he'd known was awful when he made it, "that's exactly my point. It isn't necessary for you to endure."

"Uh?"

"I've got you. You aren't going anywhere."

"Got that right," he muttered, and gasped as his thigh was fervently kissed, sucked, bitten, nuzzled, in the space of barely a second. "And I don't seem to be coming anywhere, either." And then "Ow!" a moment later as his whole back hit the bed. He grumbled a little, calmed down by the jolt.

"You still aren't going anywhere," Hakkai smiled, not unsympathetically. Gojyo could see him now, and the bastard was still wearing his pyjama bottoms. What was that supposed to mean? "And neither am I. I could get up right now and go to sleep in my own bed--"

Gojyo's jaw dropped. "You could?" he asked, amazed. "Shit!"

Coolly, "Certainly I could. Why not? It wouldn't change anything. There would still be tomorrow. I know you can't frighten me away, and I've come to believe that you won't be frightened off, either."

He smirked. "You're not that scary."

"No. Neither are you. Neither is your hair."

"Oooh, scary hair," he laughed.

"Exactly," Hakkai smiled brightly, proud of him. "You spend too much time being vain of it, Gojyo."

"If I cut it, will you get a new watch?"

"Oh, don't cut it, please. Leave me something to play with."

He raised an eyebrow. "Right, like you need toys to play with things."

"I'll play with you. Is that all right?"

"Now he asks," Gojyo griped. Hakkai laughed out loud, then settled down to regard him thoughtfully. He looked up at him warily, and said, "If there's anything on my face, it's your fault."

"Oh, no," he was told absently. "I'm only considering..."

"Uhoh."

"Ah!" Hakkai said brightly. "I understand now, Gojyo, and I'm terribly sorry. I've been going about this all wrong."

Gojyo eyed him. "If that's what you call 'all wrong,' I take it back. You are that scary."

"But it's very stupid of me," he insisted, settling in between Gojyo's legs again and resting a pensive, wistful face on his thigh, running a comforting hand along the outside. "Why didn't you tell me I was boring you?"

Gojyo stared at him, stupefied. After a moment, he said, "Oh. I see. We're in Hakkai-logic-land, where I don't speak the dialect." Hopefully, he added, "You could write it down for me?"

"I already did that," Hakkai chided him. "Perhaps you weren't paying attention?"

"No, I'm a bad student," he admitted unrepentantly, grinning over at him, and got a real smile back. Happily, he concluded, "You'll have to do it again."

"I hope you aren't going to make me repeat myself," Hakkai said with a surprised, disappointed face that was pretty much hooey. "No, I think I would prefer to translate."

"Hai hai, sensei," he said absently. If he closed his legs just two inches, he could rub himself over the placid curve of Hakkai's cheek, brush that longish fringe of hair over himself, get a taste of those cold cuffs. Maybe, if he played his cards right, he could sneak his way inside that mouth and find out whether butter really wouldn't melt on a silver tongue. He hoped it would. "All ears here."

"Hardly," Hakkai noted, a little dryly. He followed those arch green eyes to the part of him that had best followed his thoughts and was, naturally, drooling.

He smirked, and tilted his hips up a little, just making a point. "Waiting."

"Well, you see, Gojyo," Hakkai said easily, "it's like this. I really am very embarrassed. It's unforgivably clumsy of me to merely keep repeating over and over again that you're--" Chomp. Closer than ever before.

"Yours," Gojyo gasped, flat on his back again and staring hazily through the ceiling, shivering.

"Yeff!" Hakkai lauded him through a mouthful of joint, so approving that Gojyo would have kicked him if he could have gotten his legs to work. "You see? There's no need to keep repeating it if you understand already."

"Condescending bastard," he muttered. He tried to hook his ankles around Hakkai's waist to pull him in, but the hands were back on his knees, spreading him wide and low, and he didn't have the coordination just then to shake them.

"And yet here you are," his friend sighed happily, dropping a kiss just to the fucking left of where he needed it. He bit his teeth and, barely, didn't whine. "And here you stay. Do you know why that is, Gojyo?"

"I th-thought we were finished with that part," he said faintly. "Will you come up here, please?"

"In a moment."

"Can I just have your hand?" he asked plaintively. The sheets were very unsatisfying to grip, and Hakkai felt very far away down there.

There was a silence and then, sounding overcome, Hakkai whispered, "Soon," and started to stroke him, oh, finally, finally, hands still bracing his legs wide and just that soft, warm cheek stroking up and down. He groaned like a teakettle, helplessly, his fingers twitching.

Hakkai paused again, and then passed him the thin, lavander shirt. "Soon," he repeated, sounding just as helpless. "But you understand, don't you," he pressed anxiously, "that to give yourself isn't enough?"

Gojyo pushed out a breath of laughter. "It better be, 'Kai. I got nothing else."

"But it isn't."

This was starting to be too much. He buried his face in the nightshirt, and the heady smell it had trapped steadied him enough that he managed not to scream in frustration when he asked, "Well, what else do I have to do?"

"But that's what I'm saying, Gojyo!" Hakkai sounded almost as frustrated. "That's just it. It's what I was saying before. You can't do anything else. It isn't enough to give. You have to be claimed."

He didn't know whether it was the word or Hakkai's fingers tightening and shaking him that did it, but something rocked him at that, ground his bones together. It was a new word. "I guess you do," he said softly, wondering.

"Yes," Hakkai breathed. "You can give and give until there's nothing left of you, and if no one gives back you'll just float away. This is a two handed game. It doesn't matter how good you are, how dedicated. You can't play it solitaire. It was wrong of them to make us," he said, not bitterly but with conviction. "You aren't leaving, we both know that, but do you know why?"

"You won't let me?"

"I won't. Do you know what that means, Gojyo?"

"You'll have to stick around," he answered, and he wasn't wearing this smile, it was wearing him. His lungs were doing this odd expanding trick; they were already twice the size of his ribcage and filled with bubbly. He wasn't sure how they were managing to do that and breathe at the same time, but Sha Gojyo didn't question miracles. Well, except the ones that came with catty, swan-shadowed hermaphrodites, anyway. "Right?"

"Yes," Hakkai sighed, half fervent, half relieved. "Yes. Exactly. I'll have to keep you with me."

"Short leash, huh?"

"Very short."

"But what if I want a girl?"

That must have been expected, because Hakkai was annoyingly unruffled as he said in Don't Mess With The Polite Guy voice, "I'll pick up some water balloons next time we're in a town. Sand should do the trick. Come to think of it, giving Sanzo a stress ball might be a Very Good Idea..."

He ignored that, and his eyebrows shot up. "Really? Will you wear 'em?"

Hakkai paused. "I hadn't intended to," he said cautiously. "I think I should be reluctant."

"Aw, come one," he coaxed, "you'll dress up for some bat-demon, but not for me?"

"I also killed the bat-demon, Gojyo."

"Oh." Dashed, he sighed, and pulled a plaintive face. "Oh, well, it was a good image. Something to take out on cold nights."

"Really," Hakkai said coolly.

"Yeah," he said regretfully. "You're prettier than her anyway," he added inconsequentially, thinking of the girl Hakkai had dressed up for. Hakkai probably thought he meant Kanan, but the Princess was too skinny for his tastes; as pinched-looking as Sanzo. Either Sanzo. He sighed one more time and concluded lecherously, "I'll just have to find something else to squeeze. Hey, how would you do the--"

"I'm sure I can think of something," he said hastily, but the frost had receded. Possibly to himself, he mused, "Gelatin, perhaps?"

"Oooooh," Gojyo cooed, mostly mocking him. "So creative, sensei."

"I'm sure you can keep up."

Gojyo glared at him, narrow-eyed. "I've been keeping it up for how long now?"

"True," Hakkai apologized, "it's rude of me to keep you waiting so long, isn't it?"

"Yes," Gojyo agreed in his primmest voice, and laced his arms casually behind his head, still clutching the shirt. "Yes, it is."

Hakkai chuckled. Score! "Well, I apologize. I never said I was a particularly good teacher."

"Hey," he said dismissively, reaching out and gently taking a lovely face in his rough hand. "I got it, right?"

"Right," Hakkai glowed warmly down at him, covering the hand with his own.

"Soooo," he said, comfortably wiggling into a more comfortable place on the mattress, mostly to watch those moss eyes flare dark in admiration, "do I get a reward?"

"Ah," Hakkai said, sitting back and suddenly looking shifty.

He raised his eyebrows, and then himself up on his elbows. "Whaddaya mean, ah," he asked suspiciously.

Everyday-Hakkai was back, looking embarrassed. It was nice to see the muscles in his chest shift like that, the shoulders pulling up and front as they hollowed him; Gojyo could pull this memory out the next time he did it dressed and in public. "Er. Well, you see, Gojyo, the thing is..."

"The thing is?" he asked dangerously.

Hakkai's lips pressed together and his eyes darted up as he flushed lightly. This, too, was a familiar expression, although it was usually directed at Sanzo. This was Seeking A Positive Spin face. Finally, finding one, he lifted a finger and offered, a little sheepishly, "Um, you're the only man I'm carrying to bed, as well."

"Huh?"

Hakkai looked pained. And embarrassed, and regretful, and behind it all there was a wry hint of 'laugh with me; isn't it ridiculous?'

Oh.

Oh. Oh, that little... Gojyo's jaw dropped. Caught between delight and fury, he couldn't stop the disbelieving grin that pulled at his mouth. "You fucking tease," he breathed.

"That wasn't my intention," Hakkai frowned, annoyed. "I wasn't thinking very far ahead, I suppose. At least, not immediately ahead."

"Or, y'know, at all? Ladies and gentlemen, he talks a good game..."

"Gojyo..."

"So that's what all that next-time stuff was about!"

"It was about what it was about." There was a bit of an edge there, but he met it with an amused challange, telling him he wasn't buying but also didn't much care. Consideringly, possibly for revenge, Hakkai went on to muse, somewhat obscurely, "I could possibly lick you to death..."

"You already did that," he grinned and, sitting up and scooting back to the headboard, opened an arm to him. "C'mere, you."

Hakkai sighed, with that refusing-to-look-put-upon smile he used sometimes, but settled against him, warm and solid and there, nestling in. "There are treatises, you know," he said absently, reaching up to finger Gojyo's hair, "about how to build your qi with a woman--a hundred techniques the well-rounded scholar is supposed to study."

"And I bet you were dedicated, yeah?" he chuckled, dovetailing his hands comfortably around that solid, willowy waist. Even seeing that scar always turned his stomach to tight, tender mush. It had brought them together, taught him to put someone else first. When he touched it his lungs went, too.

"I wanted a post,' Hakkai said bitterly. "One I could support her on. Teaching young children doesn't pay very well; it needs no qualifications. I was almost ready for the exams--I knew the points I wanted to use to answer the most likely questions, and several orders to arrange them in. I had practiced writing them until I could do it beautifully in my sleep. I would have gone to ChangAn in a few months, when the harvest came in and the children were needed at home."

"I've seen some of those 'treatises'," Gojyo said, nuzzling in to his temple and unlacing his hands to start petting low, trying to get them back on track. "Kinky. We could probably adapt most of them."

Archly, Hakkai murmured, "Especially if I get the gelatin?"

He grinned. "But you aren't supposed to come, are you? The guy isn't, I mean."

"And which of us did you envision as--"

"I'm just asking. Can't blame a guy for being curious. I thought you liked people being inquisitive and shit, sensei."

"You're right, in any case," Hakkai admitted, his tight back slowly uncoiling. "It's thought that yang energy is transferred to the woman along with--er, in the process."

Gojyo frowned, a thought striking him.. "You don't think it'll be a problem, do you? If we have to fight? 'Cause let me tell you right now, Hakkai, I'm holding you to that whole sticking-around thing."

"Well, I don't feel diminished from last night," he shrugged lightly. "Or at least I didn't until after the ceremony. In any case, even if that theory proves to be true, I'm not concerned. I'm sure you'll return anything I give you."

"Yeah, I'm generous like that," he smirked. "Is that how it works?"

"In fact, yes." Hakkai was unruffled. "It's said to be a problem with women because they have so little yang energy to return. One would think that, realizing this, techniques between men would be more widely written."

"Not?"

"Not at all," he sighed. "And therein lies the difficulty."

"Well, don't worry, sensei," Gojyo said comfortably, turning his face to kiss him, just an IOU at the corner of his lips. "Your education is in good hands."

OMAKE!

The SEME at the end of this fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

and adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU.

Hakkai: (braces hands on knees and pants. Looks up, blinks) Oh, my! This is the end of the fic--but the only one here is me! (heart) I, lovable, placid old Hakkai am the seme at the end of this fic! I keep telling you not to anticipate, and you were so worried... Perhaps next time you'll have a bit more faith, ne? ''o.^``

THE END

Hakkai: oh, I am so embarassed! ''W,W``

Gojyo: (comes to lean on his shoulder) And you're a pretty lousy seme, too.

Hakkai: ''W.--``

Gojyo: Yup. You need practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice...

Hakkai: ...You begin to persuade me.

[end part 18]

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Chapter 19: The SEME at the End of This Fic!

NOTES: Have fun! I did.

And so, with apologies to Grover,

Hir Wicked Style

THE OMAKE!

(by Nightfall)

The SEME at the end of this fic

starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI

Hakkai: (bows) Ohayo gozaimasu.

and adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU.

Tenpou: (waves) 'hayo.

...

Tenpou: This is a very dull page, and it isn't very polite. Moving on!

Hakkai: (double take) Ano... excuse me, Tenpou-san, but what did that say? Did it say there will be a seme at the end of this fic?

Tenpou: Well, yes. So I think we should hurry, don't you, Hakkai-kun?

Hakkai: O.O I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Tenpou-san. You see...

[flashbacks to Chin Iisou, Hyakugun-Maou, the bat-youkai with the whip, Homura, that deranged illusion-maker from Requiem]

Hakkai: ...You see, Tenpou-san, the fact is (I'm ashamed to admit it, but) I don't really get along very well with semes.

Tenpou: O.O Why on earth not?!

Hakkai: (brightly brittle) Ne, Tenpou-san, I have a suggestion. If we don't click any links, we won't reach the end of the fic. Which would be a good thing, because there is a seme at the end of the fic. So please don't click the link, if you wouldn't mind. (heart)

Tenpou: Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Hakkai-kun. Ikuzou!

Hakkai: (youkai) Don't make me hurt you.

Tenpou: (kami) (eyebrow)

Hakkai: (a twitching pile of despair) You... you clicked the link.

Tenpou: Of course! (heart)

Hakkai: You know, Tenpou-san, I thought karma was supposed to catch up in your next life.

Tenpou: ...This is your next life, Hakkai-kun. Ne, cheer up! A gentle rain caresses the cherry blossoms, Kanzeon Bosatsu's put jasmine insense in the halls today, I just got a new shipment of manga from the Tougenjyou, and somewhere out there is a redheaded ruffian with no sense of delicacy who is willing (dreamy) to do all the work.

Hakkai: (despondant) Rain. That's all I needed.

Hakkai: Eheheh. It seems you don't understand, Tenpou-san. You see, clinking the links will bring us to the end of the fic, and there is a seme at the end of the fic.

Tenpou: (a huge lech) I understand that very well, Hakkai-kun! 8^3 ...It's your reluctance I find inexplicable.

Hakkai: Clearly. However, this will stop you from clicking the links. See?

(Pulls out Sanzo-action figure and pulls the string in the back. Sutra does its thing.)

Hakkai: There! The pages are immobilized, so you can't--

Tenpou: (klik)

Hakkai: YOU CLICKED ANOTHER LINK! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO ME!

Tenpou: (aside) Does living make everyone this high-strung?

Hakkai: (slumped) How did you do that, anyway?

Tenpou: (pats his shoulder) Welcome to the Internet, Hakkai-kun.

Hakkai: Ah. (glum) Note to self: next time, aim for the mouse.

Hakkai: Ah, well, it's tiring to work alone in any case.

(whistles)

Goku: Huhuhwhat?

Hakkai: Ne, Goku, would you like me to make you some yakisoba?

Goku: O.O HAI!

Hakkai: Then do me the favor, please, of guarding that link from this gentleman.

Goku: Okay--WAAAAAAAI, TEN-CHAAAAAAAN! (glomp)

Hakkai: (sigh) Perhaps that was to be expected. =.=

Tenpou: Goku, you're looking very well! You've grown up a lot, and you barely look starved at all anymore. Konzen must be taking very good care of you.

Goku: But I'm hungry aaaaaall the tiiiiiime, Ten-chan! In fact, I'm hungry right now. Hakkai, haraheta!

Hakkai: Well, I did offer you that yakisoba, Goku, but I suppose it would be impolite to make you fight your friend for it. --.--

Goku: (blinks) Huh? But don't we fight Kougaiji and Yaone and Lilin and that erokappa's brother all the time? Aren't they our friends?

Hakkai: Ano... something like that...

Goku: ^_^ So there's no problem! Come on, Ten-chan, let's fight, and then Hakkai will make us yakisoba!

Tenpou: o.O

Tenpou: Goku, I think Konzen might be a bad influence on you.

Goku: Huh?

Tenpou: Never mind. Very well, if you wish to fight, I hope you don't mind if I don't hold back.

Goku: Oh, sure! It wouldn't be any fun if you did! (heart)

Tenpou: In that case...

(whistles)

(enter a short yellow-eyed kami with an enormous spider attatched to the front of his head)

Goku: ??? .... !!!!

Nataku: Marshal, that wasn't a very respectful summons.

Tanpou: My apologies, Toushin. However, there's someone here who would like to see you.

Nataku: ...Goku!

Goku: Waaai! You remembered! (heart)

Nataku: Come on! I still haven't showed you the Field of Blue an' Purple Flowers, or the Really Cool Place Under the Stairway to Heaven, or That One Tree With The Crooked Branch, or...

(drags him off.)

Hakkai: (sigh)

Tenpou: ^_______________^

Hakkai: Well, perhaps Goku is a bit distractible. I have another idea.

Tenpou: Oh?

Hakkai: Jiipu, would you be so good as to guard this link and stop it from being clicked, please?

Jiipu: Kyuuu!

Hakkai: Thank you, my frien--

Tenpou: GOUJUN???!

Goujun: Marshal, you have an annoying habit of addressing your superiors---????! [Is that... me?!]

Jiipu: KYUU???! [Is that... me?!]

(Goujun has heart attack from shock)

(From Goujun's body, a small white dragon rises)

Jiipu: Kyukyu. [You have got to be kidding.]

Hakuryuu-chan: K'kyu. [I agree entirely.]

(Hakuryuu-chan disappears in a puff of paradox and reappears at some point during RELOAD.)

Kanzeon Bosatsu: So that's what happened to him! ^_^

Hakkai: Well, immobilizing the pages didn't work, but suppose we try this...

(aims qiball at page source)

Tenpou: (impressed) My, my, Hakkai-kun! You're a very quick study!

Hakkai: o.^; Well, it just occurred to me; I thought I'd give it a try.

Tenpou: Keep this up, and we might be able get my old job back 8^) Unfortunately, however, I still have resources of my own.

(opens the door)

Konzen: LEAVE THE FUCKING CODE ALONE, YOU SONOFABITCH! YOU'RE JUST MAKING MORE PAPERWORK! YOU'RE NOT THE ONE WHO HAS TO WORK IN QUINTUPLICATE, YOU INCONSIDERATE BASTARD! (stomp stomp thwack storms off)

Hakkai: @,@ Sanzo... high heels... lilac... hair... (swoon)

Tenpou: I regret to inform you--well, no, actually, I'm afraid I'm so impolite as to not regret it at all in any way whatsoever. Regardless, it seems to be up to me to inform you that despite Hakkai-kun's extremely hard head--he gets it from me (blush)--he has been unconscious since Konzen trampled all over it. At least, I think it was for that reason, although a person of less delicate sensibility might suggest that it had something to do with Konzen's trouserless robes. Regardless, since there's no one awake to try and stop me from getting lai--I mean, from clicking the link, there will be no omake for this chapter. Since it must be so and all that, gentlebeings, and I hope you will permit me the pleasure of wishing you all a very good morning. Jaaaa ne.

Tenpou: Ah, Hakkai-kun, you're awake. How do you feel?

Hakkai: Tenpou-san, we're getting disturbingly close to the end of the fic.

Tenpou: Indeed we are, Hakkai-kun! ^.^

Hakkai: And there is a seme at the end of this fic.

Tenpou: ^_____^ So we have been led to believe. (hormone sparkles)

Hakkai: (very tired) Tenpou-san, I'm begging you. Please, do not go to the next page.

Tenpou: Begging?

Hakkai: (on his knees; has had no pride in years) Certainly.

Tenpou: ...You know, Hakkai-kun, for someone who claims not to get along with semes, you make a magnificent sub.

Tenpou: (rubs hands) So, have you given up, Hakkai-kun?

Hakkai: (gets off knees, loosens hands) I'm afraid not, Tenpou-san. In fact, as close as we are to the end of the fic, I'm afraid I'm getting rather desperate.

Tenpou: (Marshal Of Western Army) Oh, Hakkai-kun, you're not going to try and fight me, are you?

Hakkai: (Berserker And Genocide) Well, yes, that was the idea...

Tenpou: But Hakkai-kun, you're out of pawns.

Hakkai: Well, yes, but aren't you?

Tenpou: (ruffles his hair) Don't be silly, Hakkai-kun! We know how to deal with rampaging youkai around here--erk!!!

(Hakkai martial-arts him into a chair and secures him there with layman's sash.)

Hakkai: Please don't try to escape, Tenpou-san. I'm afraid I'm rather good with knots. o,^;;

Tenpou: #O.O# (hormone sparkles) Is this what they mean when they speak of narssicism?

Hakkai: ...ExCUSE me?

Tenpou: Well, I have to admit, Hakkai-kun, you are extremely good at knots. I can't move at all. And I'm frankly turned on.

Hakkai: ...I'm going over here now.

Tenpou: However, as I was about to say before I was so masterfully interrupted--

Hakkai: Way over here.

Tenpou: --I'm not entirely out of tricks.

Hakkai: (dubious) Is that so, Tenpou-san?

Tenpou: >8^> Oh, it is, Hakkai-kun! Here, I'll show you.

Hakkai: Oh, certainly. By all means.

Tenpou: Oh, Taishou! (heart)

Kenren: The hell? Tenpou, why are you tied to a chair with a scarf I don't own? Is that one of Konzen's? And how come there's two of you?

Hakkai: I resent that. Some of us bathe more than once a week.

(turns around)

(jaw drops)

Tenpou: ^____________^

Kenren: Hey, Tenpou, he's cute!

Hakkai: (purrs) Ne, Gojyo, this is a good look for you... I can see your whole face... And most of your chest...

(pounce)

Kenren: Gyaaaaaaaaa!

Hakkai: But I'm afraid that lumpy skull will have to go...

(jacket flies)

Kenren: #@,@# Oooh... uh, Tenpou, you okay with this?

Tenpou: Taishou, I have a front-row seat. n,n But if you would be so good, as soon as you're finished, if you would kindly click on that link down there...

Kenren: Oh, sure. I can do it now if you want; get it out of the way.

Hakkai: NO! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Tenpou: Damn!

Kenren: (annoyed) Oi...

Tenpou: (very cheerful) Well, no matter. You may as well return to your duties.

Kenren: (big grin) Yes, sir. With pleasure.

Tenpou: ...Aren't you going to untie me, General?

Kenren: Submitted respectfully, Marshal--no.

Tenpou: ...Good answer.

Hakkai: (braces hands on knees and pants. Looks up, blinks) Oh, my! This is the end of the fic--but the only one here is me! (heart) I, lovable, placid old Hakkai am the seme at the end of this fic! I keep telling you not to anticipate, and you were so worried... Perhaps next time you'll have a bit more faith, ne? ''o.^``

THE END

Hakkai: oh, I am so embarassed! ''W,W``

Gojyo: (comes to rest on his shoulder) And you're a pretty lousy seme, too.

Hakkai: ''W.=``

Gojyo: Yup. You need practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice...

Hakkai: ...You begin to persuade me.

[Okay, I'm done now. Really. Good night, and have a better year than the last one!]

[end]

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