Part 2: Giving Up the Ghost

by Princess of Pain

~NOTES: 58/85 obviousness abounds, as well as references to Hakkai's past. This took forever as fics go, mostly because Hakkai 'talks' a LOT. It's a lot easier for me to write Gojyo, since I sympathize with his character more--don't ask me why, it just works that way. Writing Hakkai is hard. I guess it's because I view Gojyo as being more tactile and simplistic--he's a doer, not a thinker. And I see Hakkai as being far more intellectual.

At the same time, this isn't the Hakkai presented in the series, which also would have made things easier. This is Hakkai when he's only been Hakkai for about 6 months or so, and with his past not very far behind him, he has a lot less control and a lot more problems dealing with things. The silly bastard also refused to let me edit things down, and insisted on composing gigantic, epic paragraphs. So here we are, and I hope you enjoy it. Despite its difficulties, it was fun to write.~

And until that moment in time, Hakkai did not believe that a heart as small as his could contain that much... everything.

It was not supposed to be this way. The blood in his monstrous veins pounded that message through his system. The words throbbed at his temples, thrummed in his brain, tingled in the nerves throughout his body. It made his right eye and the scar on his stomach ache in a distant, reminiscient way.

This was not supposed to happen. He was Cho Hakkai, and though that name granted him a new chance at living like a normal person, the ghost of Cho Gonou simply would not permit it. He was making new memories here, with Gojyo and with the townspeople, and he was the happiest six-month-old there ever was... but you couldn't live as one man for 19 years, and not have difficulties burying him. Gonou was a restless ghost who walked and moaned and gibbered, mostly when it rained, but occasionally whenever Hakkai was trying to let go and be happy. A ghost who reminded him of what he'd done, who he'd lost, and how despicable both of those things made him.

Both things also explained why this wasn't happening.

None of the villages he'd ever lived in celebrated Harvest Eve. He'd accepted the concept but declined the practice. The very idea of humans pretending to be demons struck him as ghastly and ironic. Gojyo had gone, as he'd known he would (it was such a Gojyo holiday), and that was all as it should be. He had been enjoying his book; he'd just gotten to the bit where the main character had to choose between the life of a child and continuing his quest when the door slammed open. (1) Gojyo needed to fix his mask, and *that* was as it should be. He'd asked the costumed man a few questions--where he had procured the mask, how many cups of sake had he drunk--then suggested that he put away the knife.

Gojyo did, and everything was fine until the redhead fell, pulling out the knife drawer on his way down. Blades clattered down around the hanyo, like the rain at the end of the world.

Hakkai's heart had stopped. He could not tell if Gojyo was bleeding--he was wearing far too much red for blood to show--but he was moaning, like a man in love with his worst enemy. If he could have teleported to Gojyo's side, he would have.

Even then, everything was still mostly fine, because the other man wasn't hurt. Then Hakkai had helped him to his feet, and Gojyo had put his arm around Hakkai's shoulders--to give himself balance, of course--and now he was standing, and his arm had slipped off of Hakkai's shoulder, and his hand was still there, the fingers lightly curled around Hakkai's ear and feathering against his hair, the rough callous of his thumb brushing against his cheek. Gojyo wasn't letting go, in fact he seemed to be holding on, and that smile? It wasn't his silly grin, or his casual one, or the one he wore sometimes when he was angry but knew he was wrong. It was the lilting, slow, and slightly predatory smile which Gojyo always saved for whatever woman he'd settled on for the night, and no, this was NOT in the game plan, and this wasn't how Hakkai's life was meant to be.

He swallowed. It hurt; his throat was constricting. Somehow, he managed to bargain with the muscles permitting him to speak. "Gojyo, I think it's time--"

The tip of Gojyo's tongue flicked out, as if he tasted something sweet in the air. "Yeah. It is."

Something in Hakkai relaxed; something else knotted up to take its place. It was true that the hanyo's fingers were still weaving into his hair and tickling that little hallow behind his ear, but that would soon stop, and everything would go back to--

"It's high time I did this," the redhead whispered, and pushed forth, lips seeking--

Many times over the short duration of their relationship, Gojyo had both discovered and nearly stepped over the Line. Until this night, the hanyo had shown remarkable adeptness at toeing this internal Line that Hakkai had drawn in the dust which made up his soul. Throwing his arm over Hakkai's shoulder, talking to Hakkai while he was reading, leaving the door open while he used the bathroom... and, every so often, giving him a look which he didn't like. More than any other violation of his personal space, that look had bothered him. Gojyo, in those moments, looked like a man who'd just crossed a desert contemplating a glass of water.

And now, in the seconds before Gojyo's lips reached his own, the hanyo did not cross over the Line so much as he tried to erase it.

This kiss, if it could be called that, lasted for less than a second--such a negligible segment of time. The youkai nonetheless reacted as though his friend had clobbered him with a cinderblock. He tore out of Gojyo's grasp, his feet nearly entangling, his head reeling. He stumbled away from Gojyo, his feet engaging in the most ungraceful steps they'd ever take. One hand wavered over his mouth. He felt like he'd just finished off a cup of tea, only to be told that it had been made with nightshade.

O no, this wasn't the way things were supposed to go for Cho Hakkai at all.

The hand which had just been toying with Hakkai's hair (and did he have gooseflesh rippling across his arm? What do you think?) drifted down to the kitchen countertop, as if Gojyo needed the extra balance. That awful, predatory smile was still there, but a shot of confusion was layered into it. He was almost squinting at Hakkai, as if his incredibly symbolic eyes were viewing him through a veil of smoke. "... what?"

"You..." Hakkai's voice box was not working. Even if it was, what would he say? Was he disgusted with Gojyo for being male? Was he furious over the affront to her memory? Should he laugh at the joke, or hit him for... for making things as they should not be?

Gojyo appeared to be having the same trouble. He opened his mouth, then shut it again, only producing a silent puff of air. Confusion was now dominating his features.

"You're drunk." He'd meant his voice to sound matter-of-fact. Instead, it sounded almost... shrill. Like he was an animal close to panic.

"I guess." The hanyo ran a hand through blood-colored locks. His horns collapsed, then mutated into limp bangs once more. He'd seen Gojyo make that gesture before, and knew that the other man was expressing the birth of anxiety (and how open was Gojyo, how honest, how unable to say or do anything that was not just what he wanted, and wasn't that the problem?). "Or maybe I'm playing at it. Maybe I wanna be more drunk than I am. So that if you shoot me down, we can both have something to blame it all on."

"Gojyo--"

"Never happened." And as he watched, Hakkai witnessed something extraordinary: a shield went up in Gojyo's eyes. One second, those ruby-passion-colored orbs were full of Gojyo's heart--and the next, they were as empty as his own soul. He would not have believed the other man capable of building such a wall, and so quickly. The idea hurt. "I saw something that wasn't there. I'm sorry."

"... saw?" He was a regular chatterbox that night.

"Yeah. False hope, man. No problem. I'll pretend like I'm too drunk to remember, and you can hide it away wherever you store bad memories." Gojyo was still smiling, but it was the defeated grin he wore on the rare occasion when a woman turned him down. "Nobody has to know."

"I'm sorry, that isn't good enough," he said, automatically bookmarking a potentially offensive statement with an apology. "False hope for what?" Hakkai had not been this confused since he'd received his new name. He'd stood there in the Temple of the Setting Sun, staring up at the Sanbutsushin, utterly tongue-tied. Then, it had been over the idea that anyone would find enough worth in his life to spare it... and maybe, this time, that wasn't far off, either. And not only did Gojyo's fragmented words confuse him, the fact that he'd just been kissed for the first time since...

"Digging for compliments?" Silence. "Hakkai... you can be really thick, you know that? Why the hell do you think people kiss? I fucking like you, stupid. You're smart, you're kind, you're unbearably attractive, and you take good care of me." The wall in his eyes was still there, but Hakkai had the impression that Gojyo was peeking around it. "I kissed you because you're the only person I've ever met who did all four of those at once, and because all of those things make me like you. There. I goddamned said it, and now you can't take it back and make like it never happened."

Hakkai thought to argue with him. Was he not living proof that almost anything could be eliminated? Any corpse, even one as restless as Gonou's, could be buried. All it took was a will and a spade. Yet he understood what Gojyo meant (and wasn't the fact that ken passed between them so smoothly part of the problem as well?). Most days, the murders he'd committed rested heavily upon his empty heart... but at night, it was always the words which kept him awake. Gonou, you have such beautiful hands. We're not alone anymore, are we? I'm sorry, my love. I can't ever go back. Goodbye, Gonou. Words which drifted through his mind, like poisoned clouds in the skies of Hell.

That kiss could be forgotten. It had only lasted for such a short time (but long enough for him to taste the other man's habit of cigarettes, the cold kick of sake, and another taste which he could only presume belonged to Gojyo). It was already buried in a mass grave of spent seconds. But those words--had anyone ever tried to so clumsily compliment him before? Would he have noticed?

And now, Gojyo was looking at him, expecting anything at all. Hakkai wanted to scream at him. "What do you want from me?!" he'd say. "I'm not anything you say I am, and I'm not anything you transmit to me with your eyes! I am nothing, and that is all I have to give!"

Instead--and how his voice remained still and level was a mystery to himself--he said: "Perhaps. You need some rest; you're hardly standing up straight. Let me put you to bed."

Incomprehension and hurt settled firmly onto the hanyo's features, as if he were fitting on another devil's mask. It upset Hakkai, to see that. But it would be all right, because they would sleep, and in the morning Gojyo would ask if he did anything embarrassing while he was on a drunk. Hakkai would say no, and both of them would be baldfaced liars. But that would be fine, as long as he wasn't--

"Bed, then," the hanyo grunted. The hurt still lingered in that proud face. For a moment, Hakkai wanted to... "I guess... it could be hitting me harder than I thought."

The two liars gave each other knowing smiles.

*~*~*

Hakkai did not realize his own foolish mistake until he brough himself to walk out of the bathroom.

After making sure Gojyo didn't cut his feet or trip on the way to the livingroom, politely turning his head while the other man slipped out of the remnants of his costume and into the soft, amorphous pants he slept in, and ensuring that Gojyo was comfortable in the bed, he'd beat a quick retreat to the bathroom. It was the only place in Gojyo's cabin that was actually partitioned. (2) The bed was haphazardly stuck in the corner of the livingroom, which bled into a mini-kitchen--no walls. Fine for one person, but it was impossible for two to maintain any sense of privacy. He took as much time to get ready for bed as he could, in order to think.

Of course, he didn't think at all, once he realized that all of this thoughts were circling like buzzards around a particular set of words. All things led back to Gojyo's easy, accented voice, saying, "Why the hell do you think people kiss?"

So he stepped out of the restroom. Gojyo was out, over, and gone. His back was turned to Hakkai, but the youkai could see the slight shifting of ribs, indicating sleep-breathing. The other man's telltale red hair splayed like a hand across his pillow, his bangs still crookedly jutting up to join his antennae. Hakkai could see every shadow seeking refuge in the hard, muscled curves of Gojyo's back; the hanyo typically slept with the sheets only draped over his hips, like somebody's arm wrapping around a lover in sleep.

The self-evident occured ot him as he made these observations, summed up in the thought: Gojyo is sleeping on my side of the bed.

It was an odd thing to forget. Gojyo and Hakkai had shared that bed since before he'd been renamed. He recalled almost having a heart attack when, on that first night in this cabin, Gojyo climbed in beside him. Now that he knew Gojyo, he was ashamed to know that he had believed that the hanyo was going to either rape him or proposition him. In his injured state, he couldn't have fought back. He nearly asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, when that smooth, dark voice had shattered his illusions. "A whole shitload of never-agains," he'd said. "I'm never carrying another dude to bed again. And I sure ain't gonna sleep with one again, but I'm also not gonna sleep on the floor in my own damn place." Gonou had smiled and quietly apologized for the inconvenience. And when he'd come back after his trial, they'd continued to share bed-space, there being nowhere else in Gojyo's pad to comfortably sleep.

The quandary: would he be able to rest in the same bed as the hanyo?

The answer: no sir. O no. Sleep that close to the voice who asked him why he thought people kissed, to the tinge of nicotine and alcohol and Gojyo--things which he could smell in the air, feel in his skin, taste on his tongue? No thank you, no way. That was too great a burden for one evening.

Hakkai, feeling like the world's largest living marionette, walked to the bedside. Long, delicate-seeming fingers found the lightswitch, flicked it off, plunged them both quite fully into the night. His unclean hands picked up what was technically Gojyo's pillow. The floor was his domain that night.

He screamed when a strong hand pressed like an iron shackle around his wrist. In those wild moments, with his nerves already sheared and his eyes unused to the dark, he imagined that some thing was here to claim his bloody hands, his desert soul, and his hole of a heart.

"Oi, oi!' it said, as his eyes slowly revealed it to be Gojyo. "You're too high-strung, Hakkai. Your ticker's going to stop doing its job one of these days if you don't relax."

"I'm sorry," he said. A river of babble pulsed against his lips, more words than he'd been able to muster the entire night. "I don't think that sharing the bed is a good idea tonight. I mean, I think you should be sleeping with one foot on the floor. It helps to keep you from having a hangover. And you can't do that if I'm in the way. You know, I'm not that tired. I just got to a good part in my book. I'll stay up and read in the bathroom, so the light--"

The hand around his wrist loosened, but did not let go. Gojyo's fingers pressed against his pulse. "Maybe you are having a heart attack." He was let go. "Read, if you like. But you're dreaming if you think you're crashing on the floor."

"Gojyo, it would be best."

"My entire ass. I don't sleep on the floor, and I by-God don't let my friends do it. You think you're more stubborn than me? Bring it. If I have to pick your unconscious butt off the bathroom floor and drag you here, I will. In fact, if I have to kick your butt unconscious first, I will. The gods love drunks and fools, and I think I've proved I'm both."

Needles of pain bristled from the playful-sounding words.

Hakkai doubted that Gojyo could defeat him, but neither was he eager to find out... and he didn't doubt that the hanyo would try. A smile which was becoming reflexive took over his face. "Best not to tempt the love of the gods," he said, and set his pillow back in place.

*~*~*

Morning.

After a ridiculously long, sleepless night, the sun was finally threatening to break through the east horizon. Pale gold light, as insubstantial as a promise, drifted through the windows in slanted squares. Gojyo was now lying on his back, legs slightly spread, arms crooking against his torso, like he was cradling an invisible baby. The hanyo had flipped from his back to his side to his back a total of 23 times.

Hakkai had watched, and he had counted.

He'd been right: there was no sleep for him in Gojyo's bed. He laid as if in a coffin: feet neatly together, hands stacked atop one another. Sleep had not occured to him. Only thinking, and idly watching Gojyo rest. The lack of it wore on his mannerisms as no alcohol could, loosening the lips of his mind. He could normally control his thoughts. He could direct them into an endless doublethinking loop, thinking about the caboose of a train of thought without examining the boxcars. He lied to himself. But insomnia reaped a small crop of honesty.

Gojyo had kissed him, and Gojyo had done it because he... liked him. It was a difficult idea to accept. The only other person who had ever liked him enough to kiss him was dead, and sometimes, he wondered if Kanan had killed herself because of the monster he had become in her absence. If Hakkai had been in the redhead's shoes, he would have run away from himself. He was a disaster waiting to happen--wreckage that threatened to collapse onto anyone silly enough to get too close. The three small metal cuffs on his ear proved that.

Two hours into the long night, this thought popped up: Gojyo wants to be crushed.

It made sense. The endless chain-smoking, a freight-train of beer and sake, the insane promiscuity... and Hakkai. He knew enough about Gojyo's past to know that self-destruction might well be on the other man's mind.

But Gojyo, even though he made his living gambling in that stinking bar, had actually been drinking a lot less recently. He'd come home smelling of a few beers, but not like he'd bathed in Kirin. And hadn't Hakkai noticed that, in the same span of time, Gojyo had not once asked for him to keep clear of the cabin? The bedsheets had not borne the pungent odor of sex and perfume in a while.

All right, so he didn't like him because Hakkai was a bad person to be around. He could almost hear Gojyo scoffing, saying, "I've had the everloving tar knocked out of me since before I could remember, because I was a bad person to have around. Don't talk to me about stupid shit like that."

He could almost hear him say, "You're smart, you're kind, you're unbearably attractive, and you take good care of me. I kissed you because you're the only person I've ever met who did all four of those at once..."

Damn. Back to that.

The compliments made him uneasy. They unsettled his stomach, making it feel full of feathers. He supposed that he was smart, but Hakkai could not grok the other three. (3) Gojyo had been taking care of himself since he was barely a teenager. And he knew for a fact that "kind" and "attractive" were not words that belonged to a murderer.

In his mind's eye, he saw himself six months ago. Shampooing the food and beerstains out of the carpet. Polishing and buffing the kitchen floor. Cleaning out the mini-fridge of its spoiled and spilled contents. Dragging bags filled with squashed beer cans, bad food, and an endless supply of spent cigarettes and crumbled, empty packs to the corner. Washing dishes crusted with archaic spaghetti sauce and crumbling bits of ramen. Patiently dusting, plastering, painting, wiping, polishing, and repairing the cabin over a period of weeks. (4) Towards the end, Gojyo gave up offering to help him, although he never stopped looking around the place with quiet amazement. He'd accepted the changing of his bachelor pad into a home with something approaching good grace and gratitude.

So, maybe, Gojyo wasn't as adept at caring for his own needs as Hakkai wanted to believe. And wasn't Gojyo taking care of him, as well? He thought about all the times that he'd found small bundles of yen in the cabin. The bills were always creased and smoky, and there was always a note attached in Gojyo's slow handwriting, asking for some little thing at the store, and insisting that Hakkai keep the rest. The bundles always had at least three times the amount of yen needed, and whenever Hakkai brought home a new book, Gojyo would always grin. The hanyo wasn't very good at thanking, anymore than he was at things involving honest human interaction, but he managed it in his own way.

A million little memories began to flicker in Hakkai's mind, like a movie he hadn't asked to watch: Gojyo staying up until dawn with him on nights when sleep was too hard to find, playing poker and telling the dirtiest stories he knew; Gojyo's almost-apologetic face the last time he'd asked Hakkai to leave the cabin for a few hours; Gojyo never going for more than fifteen minutes without doing something to try to make Hakkai laugh; Gojyo passionately arguing the benefits of smoking. His spastic bouts of anger which never lasted long, his good-natured grumbling as he lost to Hakkai in cards yet again. Hakkai happened to know that Gojyo peed sitting down, and that he sometimes wore the ugliest clothes possible if he didn't feel like being hit on; he knew that Jien had taught Gojyo how to burp on command, and that the hanyo could reproduce over half of the alphabet in belch before he fell over laughing.

He had never realized before how carefully he watched the other man, and how he catalogued almost everything he did. Stupid gestures, little facial expressions, meaningless bits of trivia... had he really been storing this all away?

At that moment, Gojyo had turned from lying on his back to his side. Twenty-one, Hakkai thought, then nearly laughed out loud. He felt weirdly soothed, as if an unseen hand made of calm had massaged his heart. So much of what Gojyo had said still sounded like a foreign language to him, but did it have to matter? Gojyo had his reasons.

And Hakkai had his.

You're sharp, he thought, his emerald eyes examining the way that the hanyo's lips slightly parted in sleep. You're not smart, but you're quick. You have more compassion than a saint. And you are...

... and this was where his brain fetched up, like a record with a deep scratch. Gonou was not just a restless ghost at this point. He could have been a solid being, standing next to the bed, screaming in Hakkai's ear. After everything he'd done, he didn't deserve to feel so calm, so sure, so close to happiness. He did not, in fact, deserve anything. Was not his soul as dry and empty as a broken bottle in an abandoned yard? Were not his hands so stained and bloody that they could never hold anyone again, not without leaving crimson handprints that would never wash away? Was not his heart too small and hard to feel anything approaching happiness?

Kanan was where those things were. Her death had skinned his inner being and sucked it out, leaving behind only the shells. He was a puddle of water which only gave an illusion of having depth; what he had belonged to the dead, not to himself or to the living. And what he was thinking was a blasphemy to her memory, and to everything they had made. Doesn't everyone teach that blasphemy is one of the surest routes to Hell that one can take?

... then again, was he not already going to Hell?

Would one more sin matter?

And maybe, if he...

Hakkai waited until the hanyo completed his twenty-third revolution, when it was morning, and insomnia's job was complete. He was sure that his eyes must look rather wild, but he did not care. He didn't know if he felt guilt or crazy anticipation clawing through his bones, but he could not be moved to care about that, either. He did not think; he was tired of it.

A prayer had begun to knock around in his brain, like a prankster wildly banging on a door, then hiding in the bushes. And as the pale gold light wove into the air of the cabin, he quietly verbalized it.

"Kanan," he said, his voice softly reverent, as it always was when he spoke of her. "Kanan... I... just for a few minutes... I think I am going to live for myself."

Yes, that was it.

Hakkai reached out his hand, and wrapped an arm around Gojyo, pulling the sleeping man tight against his own body.

~TBC~

POSTSCRIPTUM: And this is how it will go, m'loves... if I get one single review for this part of HFWH, then I will do the next section. Just one. I'm not digging for too much, am I? ^_^;

1 - Hakkai is reading the first book of the Dark Tower cycle, by Stephen King. And I am a nerd.

2 - As my friend Margie says, "cabin" is real-estate-agent slang for "piece of shit".

3 - Hakkai has also read "Stranger in a Strange Land", and my nerdiness is complete. I am now the nerd Zen Mistress of all that is, was, and shall be again. Bow, bitch.

4 - I just moved. Most of this was crap I had to do to my old apartment, which was about the same size as Gojyo's place. I feel Hakkai's pain.