by Princess of Pain

Part IV: Sanzo's Razor

SECTION: 4 of 7.
SPOILERS: References to Hakkai's past, and to the events of DVD 5: Sting of the Scorpion. Ep's 20-21, I believe.
WARNINGS: This section contains profanity, but other than that, it's probably the mildest section so far.

*~*~*

Hakkai could hear Sanzo coming before the monk even turned the handle of the door. Wooden sandals on hardwood floors makes for loud footsteps, and Sanzo had never precisely been light on his feet, when he wasn't dodging an attack. He heard the door open and close, and the monk's clacking footsteps moving across the hotel room, and the creaking of the bed under Sanzo's weight as he sat down.

"Wore him out," he said, lighting a cigarette. "Finally managed to trick him around a corner. Had to lasso him and hog-tie him up, but he's back in the other hotel room. What is that, tea?"

Hakkai looked down at the stove. Both his hands were gripping onto its edge. His knuckles were white. The small tea-pot he'd set on one of the glowing coils on the range was making a low bubbly noise--the prelude to a whistle. The air coming from its spout smelled like hot grease. "Sake, actually. I didn't have any other way to heat it. Would you like a cup?"

"I'd like forty cups, actually. Goddamn kappa had me running across Hell and half of India."

The converted youkai thought he managed to smile, even though Sanzo wasn't watching. The hotel room had actually come with the tea-pot, and a few cups; it was slightly more high-end than most of the outhouses that they had stayed in. Surprising, really. The tourist trade didn't seem to be booming in this town, so why bother with such niceties?

He set two cups down on the kitchen counter, still not looking back at Sanzo. He could almost feel Sanzo's gaze switching between himself busying about in the kitchen and the lightly-snoring monkey in one of the beds. He picked up the tea-pot from the burner and, keeping a finger on the lid to prevent it from flying off, began to pour into one of the cups.

His hands were shaking so hard that the lid rattled against his finger. The spout of the tea-pot kept spastically tapping against the inside of the cup, making the sake swirl up and about as it poured. The noise it made sounded like Goku slamming his utensils against a table, though it was not accompanied by Goku's loud vocalizations about what food he wanted. Sanzo could surely hear that, he had to know what he was thinking about.

"I love you so fucking much..."

Hakkai forced himself to put down the tea-pot. Otherwise, he might have dropped it. He took a deep breath. He had been through rough patches of Hell before. Unspeakable things had happened to him, and he had survived. He could get through this. He commanded his hands to stop betraying him, and picked up the pot once more, and poured.

"... you think you're too fucking good for me..."

His hands were empty. Sanzo had taken it from him, and lightly shoved him aside, and he had been too caught up in the memory of a dagger voice, a thrusting tongue, and raping hands to even notice.

The monk silently finished filling the first cup, and immediately passed it to Hakkai. He took it automatically, swallowing it like medicine. They both stood at the kitchen counter, drinking the entire pot of sake in no time at all, and though it did absolutely nothing towards getting Hakkai drunk, he felt better afterwards. Something familiar that he could latch onto and call real--a marker out of this nightmare.

"We need to talk," Sanzo finally said when the sake was done with. He walked over to the tiny card table and sat down, and pulled the thick glass ashtray closer to himself. "Siddown."

"Yes." He sat. What was he going to do? Go back to the other hotel room, where Gojyo lay screaming in the darkness? Oh, no. Sitting was just fine with him.

He looked to Sanzo, as all of them seemed to do when things were too out of control. The monk's pale face bore a slight alcoholic blush, and beads of sweat were drying on his forehead. His hair was a brambly mess of blonde. He studied Hakkai as if the youkai were a pane of glass: looking directly through him.

The false priest spoke first. "How're you feeling?"

He had no idea if Sanzo actually cared, or if the blonde was merely killing time, for some strange Sanzo-esque reason. How was he feeling? His throat was still raw. The skin of his neck was covered with bite-marks. When he'd put on his sleeping-shirt (now the only shirt he owned that wasn't in tatters), he'd seen that his nipples were swelling and already turning a hot, angry red. He supposed that he'd have some terrific bruises for some time. And whenever he wasn't carefully thinking of nothing, he was feeling Gojyo weigh him down, feeling his limbs go numb from lack of blood, the weird mix of Goku's lifesblood and water soaking against his skin, the taste of ash and copper in his mouth.

"I am fine," he said, feeling like a parrot that does not understand what it repeats to its human masters. "But, Sanzo... what are we going to do about him?"

The ember of the monk's cigarette flared with an intake of smoke. Two small dots of flame briefly danced in his violet eyes. "I think we should kill him."

"S-sanzo!" It appeared that in spite of everything, he was still capable of being shocked. He knew, and had always known, that this man who was almost worshipped by Buddhists everywhere could be both coldhearted and selfish... but this was simply going too far.

"Don't start with me, Hakkai. I know you're not stupid. Don't make me question my judgment about you."

"How could you suggest something like that?!"

"Because he might try to kill us again." The cigarette's light bobbed as he spoke, playing strange tricks with the shadows on his face. "He already has. Three times, now. And even if he doesn't, he might do something worse, which you now know from personal experience."

Hakkai's face flushed--from dismay, and not just a little anger. "It isn't his fault. He's not in control of what's happening to him. Or... what he's doing." He had to believe that, at this point. He had to know that Gojyo would never try to do what he'd done. His sanity hinged on that belief. "Killing him solves nothing."

"I doubt that all the mad youkai we've killed were responsible for their actions," Sanzo said. "That's never made you hesitate before."

"That's a completely different situation!"

"How do you know?" Sanzo stubbed out his cigarette and promptly lit another, as though he were incapable of speech if his words were not clouded with smoke. "Don't tell me that you haven't thought about it."

"... yes. I have."

"The minus wave has caught up to him."

And there it was--the thought he'd had, when he'd told Goku that Gojyo was not himself (because hadn't they said so many times that the youkai were losing themselves to the wave?). The one he'd suppressed, because it was unthinkable. Yet it had not just been thought--it had been said, where the words couldn't be got back and undone. It was all the more frightening because it was probably true. Gojyo had never been considered an actual risk to the minus wave in Hakkai's mind. The human blood in him was his youryoku limiter, protecting his mind from his genetics, the DNA codes that were, in so many youkai, unraveling their personalities.

Perhaps the minus wave had a culminating affect. Had it slowly overwhelmed him? Had he been acting out of place? Had he been hiding anything from his teammates? Had Gojyo been going silently insane?

Hakkai could not name all of the emotions that swept through his soul, like a dry desert wind.

"It's not just probable," Sanzo said, immediately deciphering Hakkai's thoughts before they were expressed. "It's almost definite. I can't think of another explanation."

"Neither can I, which does not mean that one doesn't exist."

"Do you know what Occam's razor is?"

"No. I don't believe I do."

"The one thing Westerners have got right." Sanzo's eyes were forest fires. "Literally, it says that you shouldn't make more assumptions about a problem than you have to in order to solve it. The simplest explanation is the correct one."

Hakkai could see where Sanzo would fall in love with such an idea.

"Gojyo might not be affected by the wave. There could be hundreds of reasons why he's gone fuckshit crazy. But the simplest and most likely of them all is that his mind has given in. It was a risk we all knew about when we headed out on this quest. If he's lost himself, it's because he's weak." Contempt poisoned his voice. "And if it got him, the kindest thing to do would be to kill him before he can hurt anyone else."

Goku snored slightly louder, then murmured something about General Tso under his slurred breath.

"No." The word was a bullet.

"No?" The monk's glare would have turned Mount Kaka into so much lava. "Don't shit me, Hakkai. When the wave gets to you, I'll put a bullet in your head. Same with Goku. Same with anyone else. Explain to me why Gojyo's so goddamn special."

"Gojyo," he said, his voice as calm as autumn leaves stirred by a soft wind, "protected and cared for me when no one else would have. Probably when no one else should have. At the very least, I owe him my life, and I will not let you take his away so easily, if I can save it." This felt wrong. Inter-party battles were not his ideal, and all he wanted was to be driving Jeepu away from this hateful village, with a sane Gojyo and a healed Goku, and a grumpy Sanzo who was not seriously considering killing Gojyo. Not this. Never this. All the same, so much depended on Gojyo being salvagable... "If you try to execute Gojyo... I'll have to defend him."

Sanzo's anger was never silent. The closest it got was at its birth, when he would quietly threaten the lives of whoever had provoked his fury. Typically, that stage lasted all of six seconds, at which point he would explode with the force of a supernova. And explode he did. "Are you deranged? You don't owe anyone anything! Those things happened when you were someone else! And need I remind you that we're talking about the man who made mincemeat out of Goku? Who tried to gut me like a fish on multiple occasions? Do I actually have to point out that an hour ago, he was trying to RAPE you?"

Goku shifted uncomfortably in his sleep, and made a rather pathetic-sounding snort. Sanzo plowed on, apparently not caring whether or not the teen would awaken. "Would you have let him fuck you out of your, your petty altruism? If he honestly tried to kill you, would you kill him to defend yourself? Or would you let him do something he'd never normally do so that he can be guiltridden and miserable for the rest of his shitty afterlife?"

"I don't know." He honestly did not. The worst of it was that, as per usual, Sanzo was almost entirely right. "But I apply what you might call... Sanzo's handle on Occam's razor."

"Do you want to die?"

That was a good sign. Sanzo only resorted to death threats when he was bored, or running out of comebacks. Hakkai plowed on: "The simplest explanation is correct, as well as the simplest solution. If you have a problem, shoot it until it goes away. Unless that problem is Goku."

"What the fuck did you just say to me?"

"When Goku went berserk in the desert, the simplest solution was to shoot him. You chose to spare his life. Tell me why."

Sanzo's features twisted into shock and hate. He had the look of a man who has just discovered the theft of a prized possession--something which he treated so shabbily that he assumed no one else would ever want it. "There is no guarantee that the bullets would work."

"And you wouldn't know because you've never tried. Why is that?"

Hakkai, in the silence before Sanzo spoke, became aware of a strange noise. It sounded high and squeaky, like sheets of plastic rubbing against each other. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the sound of the monk grinding his teeth.

"You... bastard." Sanzo stubbed out his smoke, and did not light another. The air about his head was redolent with tobacco ghosts. He was no longer looking Hakkai in the eye, electing instead to stare out the window at the night. "I should have known better. Beating you in logic is like beating you at cards. Fucking impossible."

Hakkai's face developed an approximation of a smile. "So I've been told."

"My mind hasn't changed." The monk's voice was reproachful, as a proper priest rebuking a sinner. "If he tries to kill me again, his ass is grass. And you aren't gonna stop me."

"Come, Sanzo. We can find a happy medium, can't we?" His voice was light. It did not betray the fact that Gojyo's life was beginning to flash before his eyes.

"What."

"Give me two days."

"For what."

"I don't know. Maybe for nothing. Maybe I'll find a more true reason for Gojyo's madness. In any case, it'll take Goku about that long to recover. His wounds are fine, but he's still rather anemic. It won't be as though we'll be wasting time better spent heading West." He paused. He couldn't believe that he was about to suggest this idea. So much would be at stake if Sanzo agreed to it. But, at the least, he now knew that if he and Gojyo never spoke again, it would not be because of hatred: in spite of a cavalcade of nightmarish memories, he still loved the hanyo, and needed to work everything out, if he possibly could. "If I can't find any proof that the wave isn't affecting him after two sunsets... I won't stop you."

Sanzo turned slightly in his chair, now looking Hakkai in the eyes again. Violet slammed into verdant with the force of a sledgehammer to the skull. "You actually want to save that waste of flesh. After what he did to you."

"... yes."

"Fine. Whatever. Fuck off, I'm tired." He did look rather beaten--running through the woods, carrying Goku, dodging Gojyo and drinking half a pot of sake was taking its toll on the monk.

Hakkai did not have to fake his smile. "Thank you very--"

A loud rapping noise: someone knocking at the door.

The two men gazed at each other rather stupidly, not being able to figure out who would answer the door. Sanzo made an ambivalent grunt, and got up to answer it.

A voice, both pompous and male: "I didn't know how kinky priests could get, houshi-sama."

"Hakkai, where's my fucking gun?!" Sanzo darted back into the hotel room and flew for his pistol.

The converted youkai raised an eyebrow at the gentleman at the door--the manager of the hotel. "Can we help you? You might want to make it fast."

"Yes, you can," the manager said. "I am a very forgiving soul, and I do not care what deviant behavior people engage in behind closed doors, sir. But if you're going to tie up your boyfriend and leave him alone in a locked room, you might want to gag him. He's keeping the other guests awake." He gave Sanzo--who was rifling through his robes and sutra in search of his pistol--a rather amused and disdainful glare. "The Buddha frowns on inflicting pain on others, especially pain that they don't beg for."

"Death. Death to you. Now." Sanzo stood, the gun in his hand. His grin was borderline psychotic.

"We will! Please go, he's serious!" Hakkai said, his voice tainted with panic, and the manager managed to dodge out of the doorway before Sanzo emptied a rain of shells in his general direction.

~TBC~

NOTES: Hee. The manager returneth.

Next section: "Agave". In which Hakkai once again fails to get drunk, and Gojyo decides that it's finally time to get dressed.