by Princess of Pain

It's a typical Thursday night, and the two men are comfortable and quiet as they read. Hakkai is plowing through Machiavelli's The Prince, while Gojyo puzzles out the ideograms printed in one of his magazines. Hakkai feels a mild sense of pride over this: he's been teaching Gojyo how to read, slow and sure, over the past few months. They don't always have the time, not with Hakkai's job as a tutor, but when they do, the hanyo picks up the nuances of written speech with a speed that surprises his youkai roommate.

Hakkai doesn't want to admit it, but he (who had been raised in a church-run orphanage, and had been reading since he was four years old) had originally believed that Gojyo's illiteracy stemmed from either laziness or a mild stupidity. This was before he knew what the red in Gojyo's hair and irises means. Now, he knows that Gojyo simply never had the chance to learn.

The time passes amiably enough, until both of them are interrupted from their streams of letters by a horrified scream outside.

Hanyo and youkai are already out the door, even before they hear the gunshots.

*~*~*

The scene they find is surprising, but not shocking to either of them (they've seen worse). A youkai woman, her chest ripped apart with buckshot, lies on the earth like an abandoned toy. Standing near her, a human man, gored but alive. He claims that he acted in self-defense, that the woman was crazy and attacked him. He is just hysterical enough for this to ring true.

Gojyo and Hakkai, knowing that they are not champions of justice, begin to head back towards their home, until they hear the distinctive wail of an infant.

The infant can only be the child of the youkai woman. She has the distinctive ears, and a dark-green maple-leave pattern works across her pale, chubby face. A light drift of white-blonde hair stands in a cotton-ball corona about her tiny skull. Her fists are balled up, her mouth is wide open, and her face is almost purple from her furious screams. Gojyo is amazed at how much personality one gesture from a baby can have.

The man flushes, stammers, says he already has six children and cannot not take in another.

"We'll take her in," Gojyo says, and Hakkai can hear the hope in his friend's voice.

*~*~*

Hakkai believes that he will have to quit his job in order to care for the child, and quietly offers to do so once they return to their home.

"Hell no," Gojyo says. He's holding the babe close, in one arm, cradling her just the way an infant is meant to be held. She has fallen asleep. "Your job pays more than my gambling, anyhow. I just hope you'll be able to feed three on it."

*~*~*

Perhaps as a matter of hope, Hakkai suggests the name of Kioko.

The change in his roommate is so sudden, it seems overwhelming to Hakkai. For the first time in two years, the hanyo is amiable about smoking outside. He's willing to get up from the couch in the middle of the night when she fusses, and he bounces her lightly on his hip, rocking and soothing her back into sleep with a gentleness that his scarred exterior did not project. He sets her bottles to boil in the morning (and manages not to scorch them, as he does with everything else he attempts to cook). He pets her hair when he changes her diapers, to soothe her and keep her from kicking too much. He plays with her, almost endlessly, until Hakkai observes that she does, in fact, need to sleep every now and again.

He listens to every tip that Hakkai knows about caring for babies. More than that, he actually does them all.

On the fourth day, Hakkai goes into the kitchen to make himself breakfast, and he finds Gojyo curled up with Kioko on the couch. As sweet as that is, he knows that one false move could drop the baby onto the hardwood floor, so he awakens Gojyo, and calmly explains why Kioko should stay in the nest of blankets on the floor. The hanyo's face twists with guilt, and he says that he cannot leave her to sleep on the floor anymore.

On the fourth night, then, Kioko sleeps on the bed, braced on all sides by pillows (to prevent her from flipping onto her stomach and suffocating herself, Hakkai explains with a voice that's a shade too cool). Hakkai sleeps on the couch; Gojyo, on the floor. The youkai tries to stop him, but Gojyo grumbles that he wants to try and do something nice for Hakkai, and doesn't look him in the eye.

Gojyo does not turn into an obedient housewife. He still leaves his underwear on the floor in the mornings, and he can't cook, and he doesn't understand why, whenever he attempts to do laundry, all of the white clothes turn pink and the black clothes turn a dingy gray. But he drinks a bit less, and smokes a bit less, and he doesn't go out to the bars anymore. There's a happiness there, in the hanyo's telltale eyes, and Hakkai feels the slightest stab of envy towards Kioko, because it is the child that makes Gojyo so happy. And not him.

On the sixth day, Hakkai comes back from a grueling tutoring session to find Gojyo blowing a big, wet raspberry on Kioko's pudgy tummy. The baby laughs, carefree, as if this is the best joke in the world. The hunter-green maple-leaf pattern patchworks over her belly, as well. Gojyo doesn't seem to care that the child isn't his; he nuzzles their noses together, and Hakkai can see that, in spite of the fact that she's only been here for less than a week, Gojyo is completely in love.

*~*~*

On the seventh day, they are sitting in their usual places. Hakkai is still reading The Prince and taking mental notes. Gojyo is reading a different magazine, the words coming to him more easily now. Kioko is curled up on Gojyo's chest, her small hands tucked under her pudgy cheeks in sleep. She rises and falls in time with the hanyo's breath, her ears flickering unconsciously whenever one of the corners of the magazine brush against it.

There is a knock at the door. Gojyo always answers the door, except for now, when he has a sleeping baby on his chest. When Hakkai opens it, a youkai male stands before them. His hair is dark blonde (but was probably platinum white when he was a baby). His eyes are scratchy and red with tears.

"I heard that you found my daughter," he says.

He says that Hana went insane a week before. She'd taken Sachi-chan and run, he says, and he has been looking for his daughter ever since. He has not been home in a week; he's been scouring the forests where Hana was said to have run, praying that he would find his abandoned child. He found this village, and asked, and he was told the story of Hana's death, and about the two strange men who lived on the edge of town--the ones who'd been keeping Sachi.

Gojyo does not speak when he hands KiokoSachi over to her father, whose eyes light up like stars on a clear night at the sight of her. He does not tell her goodbye, or give her one final hug, or watch out the window as her father walks away with her. He hands her over, and he walks back to his chair, and he picks up his magazine and pretends to read.

After Hakkai can no longer see the amorphous shape of Sachi's father in the night, Gojyo violently stands up. The magazine flies across the room and bounces off the wall. He pulls on his jacket, mumbles something about not waiting up for him, and storms out of the house.

He comes back after the night has become the morning, blushing with alcohol, rank with the smell of cigarettes and the soft, tangy undertone of sex. Hakkai has already fallen asleep on the couch, out of habit. Gojyo, who cannot stand to sleep where Kioko once did, crashes onto the floor.

*~*~*

With the same shocking suddenness that overtook Gojyo's mutation into a father, he returns to his bachelorhood. If anything, he drinks more than before, and he leaves his cigarette butts stubbed out in his beer cans (even though he knows that Hakkai hates that). He makes more of a mess out of the house and doesn't try to help Hakkai set it into some kind of order. Most nights, he isn't even home, and most days, he sleeps.

Hakkai wants to be angry with him, but he understands that it isn't he who Gojyo is furious with. And he understands that Gojyo cannot reach the person he wants to attack.

So he plucks the butts out of the cans for recycling without his usual admonition. He cleans even more vigorously than before, which, he suspects, is his own way of throwing off his heartbroken, nervous energy. And he lets Gojyo stay in his funk until it begins to get dangerous, with the hanyo picking bar-fights on a regular basis. When that happens, Hakkai decides that enough is enough, and he draws Gojyo into the bedroom, and he offers him all of the comfort he can possibly give.

*~*~*

Neither one of them ever speak of her again.

To their knowledge, Sanzo and Goku never find out about Kioko's existence. They never ask, and in true Hakkai-and-Gojyo fashion, they do not volunteer the information willingly. Gojyo says nothing because it hurts him too much to acknowledge that he'd loved her. Hakkai says nothing because it would hurt Gojyo.

The closest they ever get is over a year later, on their journey to the West. Hakkai rolls over in their shared bed, his eyes dark and attempting to be emotionless, and asks if, when they get home, Gojyo would like to adopt a child. The hanyo looks like he's been slapped. Then, slowly, he smiles, and says that he doesn't want to count on ever getting home again.

"But... maybe. I don't know. Maybe."

~Owari~

AFTERNOTES: This fic idea evolved from a discussion with Holidame. We were talking about Gojyo's affinity for children. She suggested that he would make a wonderful father, except that according to the manga, almost all hanyo are sterile. Ergo, he couldn't ever hope to father a child. Somewhere out of that conversation came the idea for this angstfest of a story.