by Princess of Pain

Part II: Ever So Slowly, Thumping Away

SECTION: 2 of 7.
SPOILERS: Vague references to Sanzo and Goku's pasts. Blink and you'll miss them.
WARNINGS: Descriptions of gore, harsh language, and implications of rape.

*~*~*

The monk was gone! The hateful hypocritical lying violent bastard monk was flying far and away, out of his thoughts forever. There were more important things to think about. Aw, yeah. Like the girl. He was in love with her. Her hair shone mahogany in the sunlight, which he also loved, and her eyes were the color of a cigarette ember. He had seen full-sized melons smaller than her breasts. Want vibrated through his body and gathered in an exclamation between his legs. He saw her and decided that all he wanted in this world was to find out how tight her legs would grip around his waist when he was balls-deep in her. She didn't understand. She kept crying and running, but he knew that she was only confused, she would soon understand, he would worship her more than any other man she had ever known. Then he stopped running, because a hand had grabbed his shoulder. Someone trying to stop him. No, he would not have that.

*~*~*

"Gojyo--" Hakkai started, then found himself dodging the shakujou once more. Dismay was overcasting his confusion. Noting that Gojyo was now... obviously physically aroused did not help his nerves in the slightest.

Hakkai permitted the loops of flying chain to envelope his arm, using his other arm to catch the blade before it could remove important aspects of his head. The attack was clumsy, especially for Gojyo. He gave the chain a hard yank, and pulled the staff straight out of the hanyo's grip.

"That's mine!" the redhead whined. "You can't take it away!"

"I'll give it back," Hakkai said, his voice more measured than it had ever been in his life, "when you calm down and listen to me."

"But it's MINE and I want it!" He sounded five years old.

"Gojyo, you're not feeling very well." He deftly unwove the chain wrapped around his arm, then let the shakujou fall to the earth. A dull clacking noise rose up, as the chain pulled itself home.

"Of course I'm myself! I've never *been* more myself, I'm let go!" His eyes were storms of blood. Hakkai saw that the hanyo's body was shaking, and that his feet kept shifting in the dust, like a child nearly paralyzed with indecision. "You're stuck. You wouldn't understand. No one does. I just wanted to fuck her, what's the big oh Christ I'm hungry! Hey, look! They have dumplings!"

Gojyo casually grabbed Hakkai by the hand and dragged him in the direction of the food stand--naked, bloody, and laughing all the way. Shakujou, Sanzo, Goku, the girl... all was forgiven, or forgotten. Hakkai had seen Gojyo have mood swings before, but only a madman could switch gears so harshly. Though he was loathe to do so, his mind turned over every possible, unpleasant cause for his friend's behavior. This made smiling that much harder.

He decided to try reason once more--there had to be a way to reach Gojyo, somehow... "You know, I've been known to make good dumplings."

For the moment, the hanyo ceased to wrench Hakkai's arm out of its socket. The look of hunger he bestowed upon Hakkai was disturbing in its intensity. "Yeah?!"

"Let's go back to the hotel room. I can cook you whatever you like when we get there." He spoke with the slow, tempting diction of a parent who needs to bribe a child into being quiet. "Fried rice?"

Gojyo's eyes were huge. "Yes."

"Maybe some of the almond chicken you--"

"NOW."

And the converted youkai permitted himself to be dragged off once more, nodding and apologizing to everyone who was giving them shocked and disgusted glares, and behaving, all in all, like worry and dismay were not both crushing his thoughts into so much confusion.

*~*~*

Of all the places for Goku to disappear, it had to be a fucking mother-raping forest.

Sanzo had been looking for some scrap or sign of Goku for at least two hours. He wasn't quite sure how long it had been, because the sun had gone down some time ago, and he knew the moon was a rather unreliable way to keep time. Not to mention an unreliable light source: it was barely thicker than a thumbnail in the sky. He'd have more light if the gods had put an ignited matchstick in the sky. Not that much sunlight would get through the foliage, anyhow. This forest was thicker than Goku's skull. Smelled a bit like the saru's feet, too.

Even at night, the humidity was murder: most of the moisture that normally would have evaporated was simply trapped under the canopy. It might have been a cool night everywhere else in Shangri-La, but Sanzo was sweating hard enough to warrant peeling down his robes to the black undershirt and arm-warmers, and tucking his sutra into his belt. He couldn't imagine how nasty it would be in the full heat of the day, although it might have explained why the idiot kappa was running around mother-naked.

Other than, of course, the fact that Gojyo was an idiot.

Sanzo had a damned good idea of what had happened. He didn't like it, in spite of himself, but more than that, he knew that Hakkai wouldn't like it. He might actually have to go against his nature and employ some manner of tact when he broached the subject... oh, fuck it. Hakkai was a grown-up who had learned how to handle the shit life threw at him. He'd understand. And if he didn't, it didn't matter.

"Bakasaru!" he bellowed, as he'd been doing for the past hour or so. "Quit scratching your ass and get out here! You've got ten seconds before I start firing into the trees at random!"

He might have continued like that--stomping about and screaming until the sheer fury of his words caused the trees to catch fire--had a certain scent not drifted past his nose. He'd become intimate with that scent, through the years and the miles. It bore a horrible familiarity.

Blood. And lots of it.

The monk corrected his course, heading towards the stench. He did not notice that his footsteps were now silent--no more the angry, trampling stomps. He did not notice that he'd drawn his pistol, the black rubber grip chafing his hand, or that the barrel of the gun mimicked his eyes and looked everywhere they did. These were commands from the lizard brain, the instinct worn deep in Sanzo's character, like the paths of rivers worn into the planet. They were no longer things that required his attention.

That smell, on the other hand, did.

Sanzo had begun to wonder if he'd passed the source of the odor, when one of his sandals stuck fast in the earth. He looked down as he kicked up a bit to free it, resisting the urge to swear (subconsciously knowing that if the smell wasn't Goku's blood, or if Gojyo had not spilled it, then whatever did must still be near enough to hear him). A thin beam of moonlight illuminated the ground before him, making the clots of dirt and smears of liquid on his sandal and robes shine a blackish red. It smelled like a copper hammer was pounding into his olfactory nerves.

He glanced up, and there was Goku. Mostly. The not-quite-youkai was the epicenter of gore. Fans and dribbles of blood reflected heart's-blood red in the moonlight. The saru's clothes were a mangled maroon. Goku had been laid open on the forest floor, like a hog being slaughtered. Most of the slices and stabs appeared to be located in his torso. A grotesque, thick loop of intestines had spilled out from its moors onto Goku's lap, and there were several wounds too wide to be considered slashes or stabs. He looked like he had been gored by a minotaur.

His chest was quickly rising and falling, as if by attaining more oxygen, he could heal himself. Good. That was the important part: Goku was still breathing.

Still walking as silently as the knife of an assassin, Sanzo moved to Goku's side, kneeling in the earth beside him. Tacky blood juiced up under his weight and soaked into the knees of his robes and his jeans, which he disregarded. He found the bandages he'd brought with him at Hakkai's behest. They were pitifully unable to bind all of Goku's wounds, but they would probably keep his insides from becoming his outsides for the next few minutes. Thank the gods, he was unconscious. He'd heard somewhere that intestines--or whatever it was that held them in place--had a lot of nerves, and it hurt like a bastard to fuck with them too much.

Sanzo moved with the coolness of a battlefield surgeon. He gripped the grisly loop of guts and simply shoved them back inside of Goku, then lifted the saru up. He leaned Goku's body against his own, using himself as a bracer to hold the idiot monkey up as he quickly wrapped what bandages he had around Goku's wounds. He could feel Goku's tortured breathing, and hear a high whistling noise in his breath--he sounded like an old billows with a few holes in it. Something flipped in his stomach at the thought.

Gojyo was the least capable of the monk's companions, in that monk's not-particularly-humble opinion. While not totally useless, Goku could out-brawl the perverted kappa in his sleep (and had, on more than one occasion). It was true that Goku might have held back if he'd been attacked by a friend, but even so, he'd never let himself get shoved this close to Death.

A horribly weak, whining noise rang in his ears. Sanzo looked down, his hands knotting the bandages automatically. Apparently, the knot was tight enough to wake Goku up. Sanzo's eyes met dull golden orbs that looked without seeing very much. They looked like two tarnished coins.

"... s..." Whatever the saru had expected to see upon waking, Sanzo was apparently not it.

"Save your breath. I don't have time for your stupidity, and you need to keep quiet and work on recovering." The fucking humidity. He was sweating overtime; he could feel droplets rolling down his cheeks and collecting in the hallows behind his ears and in his temples. He gave Goku a good, hard poke in the belly to make sure that his guts weren't going to be sliding out onto his shoes anytime soon, and got a rather shrill shriek from his patient in response. He hunkered down low and picked Goku up like a baby, cradling him against his chest.

Goku's dull eyes were fuzzed over with confusion. "... san..."

"I said shut up. If I leave you here to rot, Hakkai might actually kill me. But if you ever do something so stupid as to get the shit beaten out of you this badly again, I'm not playing doctor, you got it?" He started to jog as fast as he could, given his burden. Goku did not weigh very much, considering that he ate enough for five sumo wrestlers, but it was enough to throw him off.

Goku's face crumbled, like a sheet of paper exposed to a fire. For a moment, Sanzo tried to puzzle out why what he'd said disturbed the monkey so much--then, he spoke again: "... why does... gojyo... hate me...?"

"Didn't I tell you to stop talking?"

"... but why..."

"I don't know, Goku. No one knows. Happy? Now shut up."

He did not look down at Goku again, but he could hear the quiet snuffles of the saru beginning to cry. He would have been shocked, but then, Goku had done things like this before. Most of his being was invested in how much his friends loved him and whether or not they would ever leave him. Poor kid must feel like the gods had, one by one, come down from Heaven in order to spit in his face. Again.

Sanzo furtively looked around as he darted betwixt the trees. No. No one was around. In fact, no animals were around. He hadn't seen so much as a squirrel since he'd gotten here. No one would see.

He shifted Goku slightly in his arms, in order to free up one of his hands. He rested this hand on the crown of Goku's skull. The saru's hair was thick and coarse and kinky, like animal fur. He ignored this, and lightly petted it, silently soothing his horribly injured friend. Sanzo would never verbally admit it, but this was something that Koumyo Sanzo had done, when he was little and frightened and bright with hate, to comfort him and make him feel worthwhile. A gesture of love, understanding, and connection which he had never shared with anyone but Goku. Not that that meant anything in the slightest.

He could feel Goku relaxing under his touches, slipping into sleep (or, more likely, mild shock). Good. Then he might not remember, and make the mistake of telling anyone the awful truth, about how Sanzo happened to have a heart.

*~*~*

Hakkai had decided to make Sanzo's life difficult, by purchasing another hotel room. At least, that was one of the two reasons why Hakkai and Gojyo weren't in their room when he returned with Goku. The other being that Gojyo had succeeded in killing one of them at last, and was now running mad through the township. At least it would no longer be his problem.

He decided to check for them anyhow, and after tucking Goku into one of their beds, he headed down to the front desk. His undershirt and arm-warmers were both thick and tacky with blood, and the clean bone of his robes was forever stained with the stuff, but fuck it. He wasn't trying to win a beauty contest.

The manager behind the counter seemed less than impressed with the monk. "There's a doctor three doors down. I don't know first aid."

"Shove it. I'm looking for a couple of guys who're staying here. A brown-haired dude with a monocle and a naked redhead with a stupid grin. Sound familiar, or am I gonna have to start kicking down doors?"

The manager looked at him as if Sanzo were a speck of dogshit on a freshly-cleaned carpet. One of his eyebrows was ever so slightly cocked upwards. "The brown-haired gentleman and his nude companion checked in two hours ago."

"You let a crazy, naked fuck into your hotel? Are you mental?"

"Sir, I have owned this hotel for fifteen years. I have seen much weirder things than a naked man."

Sanzo sincerely hoped that he would never be so down on his luck as to work in one of these places. "And where are they?"

"Room 85, right down that hall. Could you please move along?" The manager made a shooing gesture. "You smell like a foot locker. You're starting to drive off customers."

Sanzo's hand dropped to his gun. No, there wasn't time to do all the things he was going to do to this holier-than-thou, shitfucking bastard. "I'm coming back for you later, you bitch."

"Don't talk too rough. It gets me so hard I can't think straight. Now get out."

Sanzo could neither think, speak, nor see straight. He stammered something which he hoped was grand and scathing before stomping off in the direction that the manager had indicated, all the while engaging in fantasies involving a vice, the manager's head, and several red-hot pokers.

~TBC~

Next section: "Puttsun". In which Sanzo and Hakkai compare notes on their respective patients, and Gojyo finds what he considers to be a good replacement for the girl he pursued in the beginning of this section.