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]