It had started with the lighter.

Gojyo had had a good day.  He was feeling in a civilized, almost intellectual, mood.  He would have liked to have read something, except that there were no books and the only newspaper in the place was Sanzo’s and, more to the point, was being read by Sanzo. 

Hakkai had already gone upstairs with Goku and a pack of cards to play Shouting Thomas without the noise annoying anyone else.  In fact, the rest of the inn seemed to have turned in early, or they were all out – although where you went out to, in a two-yak village like this, beat the hell out of Gojyo. 

Well, if he couldn’t read, he could always smoke.  He tapped a Hi-lite idly out of the pack and patted his pockets for a lighter.  No lighter.

He frowned slightly, and then remembered that he must have left the lighter in Sanzo’s room when they checked in earlier that day. 

He frowned more deeply.  Sanzo’s room.  First, that meant making the effort to walk upstairs and, second, it meant approaching the explosive, gun-toting monk whose nerves had been in a high state of irritation and suspicion all day.  Oh joy.

+ 0 + 0 + 0 +

So he dragged himself upstairs, stood outside the door.  There was no smell of smoke but he could hear the rustle of newspaper and a low cough.  Damn monk – always coughing;  never knew if it was nerves or nicotine.

From across the corridor came the happy yells of Goku enjoying a game.  Poor Hakkai.  It was going to seem like a long evening to him!

Gojyo knocked on Sanzo’s door and then, without waiting for any answer (and because he was pretty sure that there wouldn’t be any answer), walked into the largest of the inn’s bedrooms.  He looked round;  he could see the lighter on a bedside table, rather a distance away from the door, and on the far side of the room.  

Sanzo was sitting by the window, a newspaper spread over his knees.  The room was cool but the priest had stripped the robe down from his upper body.  The Smith & Wesson was just visible in the back of the waist-band. 

Gojyo’s eyes glittered.  It would be one neat trick to get that gun off him first and then go for the lighter;  serve him right for being a cranky, trigger-happy prick!   When Sanzo wanted to tell the kappa to piss off, he was always far too ready to say it with bullets for Gojyo’s liking.

The monk’s face was turned towards him, the expression unwelcoming, suspicious, and distinctly discouraging.  “What?”

Gojyo thought quickly.  If he was going to try it at all, he’d better get done with the gun fast.  It was only going to work if he took the twitchy monk by surprise.

“I don’t recall giving you permission to come in.  What do you want?”  The tone was like the grating of two icebergs.  Sanzo was folding the paper, starting to stand up.  

“Best keep the bastard guessing!” thought Gojyo.  So he said nothing, but moved swiftly to where the hostile priest was getting out of his chair.  One of the sleeves of the robe had slipped over the gun and hidden it from view, but Gojyo knew where it would be:  he slid his hand along the monk’s waist.  There was a gasp from Sanzo who twisted and elbowed him away, the chair falling over backwards with a crash from the violence of the movement.

Really, Sanzo’s face was a picture!  He looked as though the half-demon was trying to rape him through his robes.  No hope of getting near him again.  Plan B then – go for the lighter and risk the gun.

“I just want my lighter.”  Gojyo turned briskly for the table but the monk had jumped halfway across the room ahead of him, still looking grossly affronted.

“That is not your lighter,” snapped Sanzo, a bit breathlessly.  He made a grab for the lighter at the same time as Gojyo;  their hands collided and Gojyo caught hold of Sanzo’s fingers.  

Sanzo’s eyes blinked in fury and a look of stupefied disbelief settled on his face.  “Not you as well!” he spat, tugging his hand away.  Gojyo wasn’t going to have that though – he wanted those hands where he could see them and not sneaking backwards for the nasty, little gun.

There was a tussle as the kappa closed on the priest, grabbing up the sides of his body and trying to pin his elbows.  You got the elbows and you could control anybody.  Basic kung fu.

Sanzo bent away from the big man’s grasping hands, almost shrieking, “I don’t believe this – what’s the matter with you all?  Can’t you keep your hormones under control, damn you?”

The word “hormones” brought Gojyo to heel.  “Eh?”

Sanzo sprang to one side and made another snatch for the lighter but Gojyo got his hand over it first, slapping down on the table as the monk continued, “You’re all as bad as each other: completely sex mad!  Stop trying to put your slimy hands all over me -”

Gojyo stared at the agitated blond, who was clearly not faking his consternation.  “Eh?”

Sanzo steadied himself and faced up to Gojyo in an attitude of determined belligerence.  “I’ve had enough.  I’m not interested, I tell you - it’s just never going to happen!  Keep your hands and lips to yourself, all of you!  Especially you, you lecherous, immoral piece of glandular fever – especially you.”  The priest was scowling at Gojyo with maximum animosity, his body turned three-quarters on, ready to guard against another onslaught.

“You are kidding?”  Gojyo’s hand was still over the lighter.  He felt a hiccup under his ribs, like a little bomb of hysteria going off. 

He looked at the scowl.  This was downright funny!

He laughed loudly.  “Sanzo-sama – you’ve got your mind on sex and you want to blame me!  Listen, Cherry chan, I’m in a mellow frame of mind and I’m definitely not – NOT - in the mood.  Go on;  take a feel down there if you don’t believe me!”  He thrust his hips forward and laughed like a drain again.  Sanzo?  Sex?  I ask you!  “Go on then!”  He offered himself outrageously. 

“Tch! You disgust me.”  Ah – Gojyo had known that THAT would do it.  Yes, he was given the purple glare, like razors set in ice - love it!  Did Sanzo even understand that it was almost a turn-on, made him look more kissable? 

Gojyo leaned a bit closer.  “That’s because you only think of me as filth.  It never occurs to you that I might want to look at a newspaper, or read a book, does it?”

“I can imagine what sort of book you’d want to look at!  And, if I think of you as filth, you’ve only got your own dirty habits to blame.  Now get your hands off that lighter.”  Sanzo took a lunge at Gojyo’s arm. 

Gojyo scooped the lighter up and stepped behind the angry monk.  One hand put the lighter into a pocket while the other flicked the Smith and Wesson out of the priest’s belt.  Sanzo spun round as he felt the tension in his waist-band change – but it was too late.  The gun clattered to the floor, and Gojyo’s long leg shot out and kicked it away towards the door.

“Irritating ass-hole!” snarled Sanzo and Gojyo saw him turn away to retrieve his weapon.  Gojyo no way wanted that gun back in Sanzo’s hand, so he seized his chance, clamping the smaller man from behind in a great bear hug.  Got him!

Sanzo did all the right things:  he relaxed and then inflated his lungs, he tried to jab his elbows into Gojyo’s ribs, he brought his feet off the floor and kicked back hard – but the kappa knew the same tricks, was always ready, was bigger and stronger.

“There’s no point fighting me!  I’m bigger and I’m stronger and I’m not letting you go.  You may have a brain the size of a planet, but I’ve been swinging a shakujo at demons for years to help a particularly ungrateful, pig-headed monk, don’t forget!  You’re not going to get away.”

Sanzo resorted to growling in his throat – he had no words to articulate the extreme depth of his present frustration.  Gojyo laughed.  “Man!  You are such an animal!”

The blond head jerked in a paroxysm of annoyance, lips parted, eyes spraying the room with their lethal violet –

“So you thought I wanted you for sex, did you?  Well, I certainly could.  Look at you – all that animal passion wasted in anger.  I could find another use for so much lovely energy, right enough. Except I don’t have to stoop to anyone so downright unfriendly and full of fucked-up suspicions.”

“Get. Your. Filthy. Hands. Off me!”  The sentence was unnaturally punctuated by kicking and attempts at clawing, backwards head-butting and plain, simple biting. 

“Ah.  We’re back to that, are we?  Well, you started this so you can just ride it out until I’m finished.”

+ 0 + 0 + 0 +

“What the hell do you hope to achieve by this, Gojyo?”  Sanzo swallowed his indignity and anger down hard, and, feeling under intense duress, forced himself to offer an opening for reasoned argument to his irritatingly strong captor, waste of skin that he was.

The strapping water-sprite settled his grip a little tighter.  “The short answer is “keeping my lighter without being pumped full of bullet holes”, you violent man of peace!”

“It’s not your lighter at all, imbecile!”  There was another fit of struggling from the prickly bundle of opposition in the kappa’s arms, and the grip was tightened again.

“Listen to me for once!” shouted Gojyo.  “What does it say about you that it’s not safe to let you go?  If you were a dog, you’d be shot dead on sight.  What am I supposed to do?  The only advantage I’ve got is my body – yeah, in more ways than one – and I’m using it, but not in the way that you thought, eh?  Tough shit for you, mister high and mighty priest.  You can just listen to the idiot, fornicating cockroach for once, ‘cause you haven’t got any fucking choice now.  Got me?”

“ “Fornicating”?  How long did it take Hakkai to teach you that?” sneered Sanzo.

“Bitch!  Will you listen?  Or do I have to squeeze your exalted ears open?”  Gojyo pulled his arms in viciously, without regard for the other man’s slighter build, or for the fact that he knew that Sanzo would rather die than show that the heftier water-demon was hurting him.

“Every day, every hour, you treat us like dirt and, every chance you get, you whack out with the put-downs - like you need an advantage!  Man!  You have every ace;  so why d’you have to keep on and on trying to make us feel so small, like we’re born to be the losers?  Can’t you be bigger than that, for once?” 

There was no answer but the monk’s body stayed still in Gojyo’s grasp;  if the lack of fight wasn’t contrition, it might at least be consideration, the kappa reckoned, so he decided to continue.

“Don’t you ever think that we might like to give our great leader credit for being generous and broad-minded once in a while?   Well, you certainly make that damn hard.  What’s your problem with lightening up sometimes?  Heaven knows, you should’ve got the measure of us by now – I’m not out to get you, and neither’s Hakkai or that twit monkey.  Why can’t you relax, instead of fighting us all the time?  Doesn’t your aggression have an “off” switch?”  The bony shoulders dug angrily into Gojyo’s chest at this and the struggling started again.

Gojyo pushed his own head down, hard, against the back of Sanzo’s neck to make the trap tighter and more uncomfortable.  “See what I mean?   Your reaction is always the same, always on the defensive.  There just doesn’t seem to be a way to make you any easier to live with!”

There was a strangled spitting from in front of him, “You could try not throttling me, you sadistic jerk!”  

“Well, stop struggling then.  Now, listen.  I don’t get you – you smoke, you drink beer and you cuss like you only know four-letter words, but, if the vice in question doesn’t happen to be yours, it turns the rest of us into filth, right?  You got any logic for that, mister sanzo priest? - ‘cause I just don’t see it” 

Gojyo lifted his head from the back of Sanzo’s neck, as much to toss the hair out of his own eyes as anything else, and the monk gulped in air.  “Nnngh!” 

“You never talk to us on the level – our level.  Yeah, you might use Hakkai as a thinking man’s sounding board but you still don’t trust him or his judgement.  And poor ol’ small balls -” Gojyo shook Sanzo to make sure he was taking notice  “ – he goes around all day aching for the least smile out of you, but all he ever gets is a dent in the head from the Fan of Correction – man, you are so mean!  That poor kid – why he thinks you’re so wonderful beats me but he does, and he deserves better than your day-in, day-out cold shoulder, fuck you.” 

Sanzo flung his head back in the hope of colliding with Gojyo’s nose and rasped, “How long am I going to have to listen to this outpouring of pointless shit?”

And Gojyo tensed, to let Sanzo feel that his muscles were good for quite some hours to come, and replied calmly and with an audible sense of satisfaction, “For as long as I choose, O great Sanzo-sama.  For as long as I damn well choose.” 

+ 0 + 0 + 0 +

Gojyo had been in the mood for something with a little intellectual stimulus, and, although putting the priest through the torture of making conversation with him wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, he was going to enjoy the opportunity as much as he was able - particularly as he couldn’t see a way for it all to end without enormous, painful and long-lasting retribution landing on his ass. 

Meanwhile, he’d better get what he could out of the situation.  And forcing Sanzo to give him answers, forcing the aloof bastard to account for his cumulated abuses and general nasty-mindedness, did give Gojyo quite a kick alright.  

Sanzo, on the other hand, was considering whether to maintain a frigid silence. 

Except that the stand-off could go on for bloody hours and he was already tired.  His eyes were sore and his joints ached from sitting in the jeep for so long, and his fragile mind was already scratched all over with the inflammation of planning for demon attacks and for the journey West - but to where?   Day after day, the same fibre of his exhausted intelligence was stretched thinner and thinner on the skeleton of nervous alertness on which their bare survival depended.  It wasn’t as though the other idiots were going to provide any solutions.  The morons had no idea of the strain - 

“So why are you always so freaking hard on us?  Have you even got an explanation, or is it just your instinctive bad temper at work?”

“I have to be hard on you bone-idle bastards!  Do you think I asked to be saddled with  such a bunch of slackers?  You think I want to spend my time and energy yelling at a trio of mindless wasters, who can’t even find the collective will-power to get out of bed before lunch-time?”  Sanzo swung his head round to whip the fine lashes of his hair across Gojyo’s eyes.  “I didn’t have any choice about this mission or about the monkey - or not much choice about taking the mass-murdering school-master - but nobody forced you to tag along, so don’t give me any shit if you don’t like my style.  You can go home yesterday.” 

“No way!  I’m not quitting for nothing.  I owe it to Hakkai to stay on board, but that’s not the point – and it’s kind of not your business anyway.  The point under discussion is why you can’t get off our backs sometimes.  Everyone needs to relax at some point, even you, you arrogant prick.”  Gojyo pulled his arms tighter to give the priest another painful squeeze in payment for the hair-in-the-eyes trick.

Sanzo ignored the distress signals from his body and continued the argument, “I relax when I sleep, dumb-ass – and I’d be sleeping right now if you hadn’t lost what tiny portion of sense you ever had!  There’s no point talking to a brain-dead idiot like you about discipline.  You’ll never understand:  you’re too damn scruffy, too content with your own poor performance.  Let me put it simply for you:  you’re happy as long as you’re better than the worst, whereas I’m never happy to be any worse than the best.   Does that answer your question, bug-brain?”

“Yeah, yeah.  It gives me your answer – but it still doesn’t explain what gives you the right to force your smart-ass, high ideals on the rest of us common filth.  Maybe I’m a bug and crawling along in the dirt is just what I do;  I don’t have to aim to be a higher life-form, right?  And you’d be a lot easier to follow if you didn’t drive yourself and the rest of us so damn hard all the time.  There must be times when it doesn’t matter so much and you could give us some slack without the sky falling in, mighty leader.”     

“It’s like everything else, stupid:  if you can’t keep the small stuff where it belongs, what hope have you got of keeping a grip on the important things?  Haven’t you learned anything about life?”

“Me?  At least, I’ve lived.  You’ve been too busy admiring your own blinkers!  You’re such a donkey!  You must know the old saying “He who doesn’t depart from discipline becomes a donkey, but he who treats discipline as his slave and not as his master will become truly human.”  You sure are one hell of a weird guy, Sanzo:  you’re the only one without any youkai blood in your veins, but you’re still the least human of all of us – and by a long mile!”

Gojyo hadn’t eased off his squeeze and Sanzo put up another bout of struggle in his irritation.  “Get the fuck off me!”

Gojyo pulled him a little tighter still.  “No.  Not until you’ve talked to me nicely and we’ve had our exchange of views.  I want you to explain – teach me something useful.  You’re educated.  You’re a high priest;  it shouldn’t be that difficult for you.”

“I wouldn’t waste my time,” snapped Sanzo, through teeth gritted against the pain of ribs on the point of cracking. 

“Don’t be so daft;  you wouldn’t know it was a waste of time till you’d tried.  Even a brain-dead, slacker bug knows that.”  The steel arms widened a fraction to relieve the pressure.

“Eat me!  Hakkai’s taught a water-beetle the meaning of sarcasm.”  Sanzo tried to feel a place on his body which didn’t ache.  The kappa would suffer for this when the world turned on its right axis again!

“He didn’t have to.  You’d already shown me so-o-o-o many good examples.  Listen, we could have some good times together if you’d only use your wit for fun, instead of against us all the time.  You use beer for fun, so what’s the difference in using us for fun too?”

Sanzo snorted.  “I use beer to blunt the annoyance of your inane noise and constant bickering.  I’m responsible for this damn mission, remember.  I don’t have to rely on beer to cover my ass when the demons attack, but I do have to find some confidence that you three idiots will fight back in a half-decent fashion.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason to treat us as friends?”

Sanzo gave a mirthless bark which might have been a failed laugh.  “I’d be as likely to treat you as disciples!  I can’t afford to have friends.  It’s dangerous.  It’s entirely unsuitable for my philosophy;  you could say it’s against my religion.”

The hollowness of the monk’s voice was as close as Gojyo had ever heard Sanzo come to telling a lie, to saying something that he didn’t really believe.  “It’s normal!”   Gojyo pleaded.  “Sanzo, it’s not weak to let someone get close to you.”

The priest continued in a flat tone, “It may not be weak, but it’s not necessary either.  Getting close to people is like eating fermented bean curd:  not compulsory in a civilized society.”

The kappa was shocked by the empty – unhappy - denial he could hear in Sanzo’s voice.  Perhaps it was shock which jolted his imagination and his tongue a few steps ahead of his conscious mind, because he was slightly surprised to find himself saying, “Sanzo, if we only did what was necessary we would truly be nothing more than bugs.   You can’t mean that.  Not really.  There has to be more to it than just “not necessary”, surely?”

The priest didn’t answer, so Gojyo went on, “There’s nothing wrong with going beyond the necessary.  It’s what you do when you smoke or read the newspaper, isn’t it?  There’s nothing wrong with doing something just for enjoyment.  Making friends is just another way of enjoying life.  Why can’t you see it like that, eh?”

There was a short pause and then Sanzo said bleakly, “Getting close to someone is just accepting another big, fat cheque to be drawn on the Bank of Pain.”

“You could always walk to a different bank.  I find the personal services offered by the Bank of Pleasure entirely to my taste!”  Gojyo gave the monk a bit of a shake.  “Hey, it doesn’t have to be like that, you pessimistic prick.  It doesn’t have to be a bad experience.  You could give it a try?”

Sanzo, grateful that Gojyo couldn’t see his face, said, “I have.  I’m still trying to get the scars to close up.  And you’re in much the same position yourself, I might remind you.”  Heavens, his joints ached and he felt so tired -

“Ah, but we’re not talking about me.  It wasn’t me who jumped to the wrong conclusion back there, was it, O infallible one?  I just wanted a lighter;  you were the one that wanted a fight.  It was your nasty, suspicious nature that got us where we are now – and I guess you’re liking it a lot less than me!”

 - eyes drooping wearily. “Than I,” corrected Sanzo automatically.

“Than I.  Yeah, I did say teach me something!”  Gojyo laughed pleasantly and Sanzo, perhaps for the first time, heard the echo of true friendliness somewhere deep inside the soul of the big man standing behind him.  Gojyo’s grip was still firm but it didn’t feel like a threat, and, now that Sanzo thought about it, never had done.

“Think you’re capable of learning anything?” grunted Sanzo, reluctantly laying aside his hostility. 

The kappa grinned. “Try me.”

“I thought I had.  Crosswords in the newspaper, how to open shell-fish, imaginary numbers, useful knots, military tactics, first aid – not to mention personal hygiene -”

“You bitchy blond!”

“- how to navigate by the stars, campfires, Buddhist funeral rites, how to clean copper, the principles of meridians in medicine, flags of the world, differential calculus, steering a flat-bottomed boat, songs from Japan -” Sanzo’s list paused for a yawn.  The yawn felt awkward because he couldn’t cover his mouth;  Gojyo still had his arms pinned tightly down by his side.  Now, who wasn’t being trusting?

He continued to empty his mind of the things that he’d tried to show them over the years. 

“- edible river fish, how to tune an erhu, tracking footprints, astronomy of the Northern hemisphere, bone-setting, how to choose peaches, water divination, elementary Sanskrit, calligraphy -”  He was weary of standing.  Even with Gojyo to lean against, his legs clamoured for rest. 

He went on slowly, drifting through topics like a tired child wandering aimlessly through a never-ending garden of dreams.

“ – identification of common birds, map-reading, cultivation of culinary plants, how to draw a perfect circle, making fire with sticks, macro-economics, how to call a horse, basic concentration – so you don’t fall under the spell of weirdoes like Zakuro, – trust Goku to take a shine to him -”

“Yeah, too right.  Goku seems to have a distinct preference for weirdoes -”  He paused, but there was no reaction from Sanzo.  Good.  He must be tiring.

“ – speaking in tongues, making a bamboo flute, post-modernist colonial literature, picking locks, butterflies of South-West China, how to swim, edible river fish – have we already had edible river fish?”  The question was very slightly slurred.

“We have – but I like fish.  Can’t have too many edible river fish.”  Gojyo slowed his speech smugly;  he could sense Sanzo’s own fatigue, their combined body warmth and the lateness of the hour acting as an efficient tranquillizer.  Sanzo’s fight was spent. 

“ – where to find fungus, calculating distance by triangulation, how to split coconuts, making paper aeroplanes from orange paper, must be orange paper, must be – must be against a blue sky, a pure blue sky -”

After his years of sharing space with Hakkai, Gojyo knew a thing or two about persuading those of a more neurotic temperament to yield to the need for sleep. 

He felt Sanzo’s body relaxing into him and could hear by his voice that the monk’s aggravation had disengaged.  There would be no more protests.

So Gojyo released his hold by a tiny amount, changing the focus of his strength imperceptibly from control to support, and said soothingly, “It’s funny you should mention that, an orange plane and a pure blue sky.  Let me tell you about something that happened to me a while back -” and he continued to talk in a warm monotone about nothing in particular and about nothing of any interest.  

And, whilst his talking floated on the air like a quilt, he made his arms into a more comfortable shape and allowed a certain golden-haired head to sink easily against the upholstery of his shoulder.

Night deepened and Gojyo spoke on and on;  he spoke on until the regularity of Sanzo’s breathing, the pull of a dead weight and the loose angle of Sanzo’s neck told him that the priest – their sneering, stubborn, up-tight, cold, bastard priest! -  had quietly fallen asleep.

Gojyo finished his sentence.  There was silence.  Even Shouting Thomas had stopped. 

After quite a while of just holding still, Gojyo gently edged himself round to the other side of Sanzo, shifted his grip and lifted the sleeping priest onto the bed.  It wasn’t so easy - the damn monk was always heavier than he looked.

Once free of his burden, the red-head shook out his arms and wriggled his back;  that had been hard work!  Gojyo straightened out the worn, silk robes to cover Sanzo as best he could and moved the pillow carefully into a more comfortable position under the priest’s head. 

Leaning over Sanzo, he couldn’t help noticing the lines of strain creasing the fine skin at the corner of the closed eyes, and the way that the purple of those too-often-angry irises had a sinister counterpart in the dark shadows of the sockets beneath. “You should really lighten up, man,” thought Gojyo.  

He put his hand into his pocket and retrieved the disputed lighter.  He weighed it in his fingers for a couple of seconds, and then put it back on the table.

In the mirror, he saw his own face crack open into an amused smile.  He’d won enough advantages tonight, and even got to keep his ass in one piece, at least till tomorrow;  he could afford to be generous. 

Pulling the priest’s door quietly closed behind him, Gojyo walked to his own room with the loose swagger of satisfaction.  Their dark monk didn’t need any more reasons to believe that his black view of life was correct - and Gojyo hadn’t given him any. 

Sure, it was too much to hope that he’d lighten up much, but they both got to sleep without the unease of resuming hostilities in the morning.

And how good was that, Sha Gojyo?  Oh, it was very good indeed!