by Princess of Pain

Part III: Damming It All

Goodness, where were those parents?

Lian shuddered. The sun had sunk behind the horizon, to die a cold and lonely death, washing everything in her town and in the expanse of desert about it in a filmy gray light. The moon wasn't yet up; dusk still tenaciously held onto the world, like a treasured bauble. It was getting cold already. You could feel the temperature dropping.

She drew her thin jacket more firmly around her body--she'd like a nicer coat, but a teacher's salary was never a fat salary. She gave the twenty or so students who still remained a bright smile. Most of them returned it. Good. No sense in them losing hope.

Lian was the town's only teacher, and she was responsible for the education of over sixty children, who ranged in ages from seven to nineteen. Their parents were merchants, out-of-work farmers, politicians--kids from all walks of life, shoved into the one-room schoolhouse and made to learn together. She did not mind the responsibility; she enjoyed the challenge, but if there was something she hated, it was how many of the broke clodhopper's kids were always left behind when school ended.

Classes were over at five, well over two hours ago, and no one had come to walk these children home.

She would be more angry and vocal, except that she knew that there wasn't anyone to really blame. The desert had eaten across their land with shocking suddenness, two years ago. One could have watched the line of hardpan creeping across the landscape, blotting out crops and grasses. Livestock and plants died in droves, and were mummified in the spiking heat. The desert was why the parents of these children were probably in one of the town's many bars, drinking their sorrows away, and getting pissed at a lot of sand and heat was just illogical enough for her to not consider the prospect.

So she sat with them, and waited. The schoolhouse was towards the edge of town, and one could clearly see when anyone from the main drag wandered up--which was why all of her kids were staring eagerly towards the road. As was she. So when the youkai snuck up behind her, neither she nor the students even really heard--that rustling could just be tumbleweeds, anyhow. She did not see them creep upon her, and when one of them reached around and tore open her throat with thick and jagged nails, she scarcely knew what had happened. All she really felt was a sudden pain, and all she saw was a field of red, and all she could hear was the sharp chorus of the children screaming in unison.

And then, she neither felt, nor saw, nor heard--in any way that the living could discern.

*~*~*

Sha Gojyo was a small, fraying pile of jolted nerves and jilted emotion.

When Hakkai had returned, and saw "Kanan"... it'd been weird. He'd looked at her, and all the emotions that had been building up behind that smile drained out, as smartly as blood from a wound. He'd set down his burden--a couple of large, paper bags loaded with food, and one smaller black bag--gestured for her to follow him, and walked out of the room. Gojyo had never seen Hakkai that silent, and he'd never seen Hakkai that dead.

Gonou, though... that was something different.

The longer his loverfriend was gone, the more nervy he got. He sat on the bed, chain-smoking every cigarette he had. He'd puzzled through most of the basic sutra, and flipped over the summaries at the beginning of the Gideon (which was some weird holy text, go figure). He had paced the entirety of the hotel room too many times to count, and he'd obsessively brushed his hair until it dried straight and fell rich and thick around his shoulders, like sunrise-colored silk. Everything he did was an attempt to distract himself from the fact that the longer Hakkai was out there with her, the longer he was not in here with Gojyo, assuring him that this was all some crazy bullshit mix-up.

He didn't know how many times he cursed himself a fool. That had to be it. He was just too stupid to figure out what was wrong about "Kanan", what set him off about her. He couldn't figure out why he'd hated her on sight, and if that meant that he was jealous, or that she wasn't what she seemed. If the second was true, her story was too airtight for him to penetrate it. Hakkai would know, though. He'd been living and sleeping with her, for shit's sake. He'd know her for a fake. And he'd figure all this out, and explain why it was allowed to happen, and then Gojyo could go about his usual specialty of ass-kickery, and then...

The door opened.

Hakkai stepped in, with his quiet, restrained grace. His face was as blank as an empty bottle of liquor. He did not smile; his lovely mouth was a hard, cold line. Looking into his eyes was like staring into the broken windows of a house marked for demolition. Yes, Hakkai was and always had been great at hiding most of his emotions, but their mental kinship usually allowed Gojyo to at least glean something of what the converted youkai was thinking. He had never been so fully shut out of Hakkai before, except for.

When Hakkai was Gonou.

"It's her," he said, his voice light and cheerful, still not betraying any trace of emotion. His eyes curved up into a smile, along with his lips. "I think it best that you spend the night in Goku's quarters. She needs a place to rest, and that's with me."

*~*~*

Goku waddled back up to his room. For once, he felt full. His stomach bulged over the edge of his pants, grumbling happily as it worked overtime to digest the prodigious amount of food he'd stuffed into it. He felt, to put it mildly, quite awesome.

He toddled up to his door, unlocked it, and pulled it open.

His first sign that something was amiss was the smell. It smelled hot and dry and smoky, like a campfire, and he inwardly groaned. There were only two people in the world to whom that scent clung so tenaciously, and one of them was still not in his room--if Sanzo was there, he'd either be rattling his newspapers or snoring.

Without looking into his room to see what horrors the red-haired cockroach had visited upon it, Goku stepped in, snapping: "Damn it, Gojyo, quit stalking me and go back to your own stupid room!"

"This is my room."

Goku heard something wrong in Gojyo's voice. He had no idea what it could be, though, and therefore ignored it. "The hell it is! You're over there! I finally got a room of my own, and you're not gonna screw this up for me, you horny kappa!"

The saru walked over to the bed, where Gojyo was curled up beneath the blankets, smoking one of his stinking cigarettes. His intent was to climb up on the bed, then kick Gojyo out of it and through the wall. And he might have done it, had he not first noticed the expression on Gojyo's face. Something really wasn't right here. The kappa wasn't angry at him for picking a fight, and he didn't seem to care about the looming threat of the skinny monkey knocking him into the heavens. He wasn't even looking at Goku, just at the wall that separated his (and his ALONE) room from the kappa's and Hakkai's. He looked... sad.

"Oi."

The cigarette bobbed the slightest bit, creating an accidental smoke-ring.

"Oi! Gojyo! Are you all right? Did you finally knock your brains loose?"

He tried to wave a hand in front of the kappa's scarred face. Gojyo absently knocked his hand aside. There was no force behind it--no attempt to kick his ass for it. And he still didn't look over at him.

All kinds of loud alarms started to go off inside of Goku's thick skull. This was more than weird. Had it ever taken him this long to get a rise out of Gojyo before? It normally took even less than this--like them sitting silently, side-by-side in Jeepu. What was he doing here, anyhow?

Instead of kicking him, Goku plopped down on the bed beside him. His full stomach was temporarily forgotten. "Gojyo? What's going on?"

The hanyo took a deep drag on his cancer-stick. When he spoke, he released a thick fume of horrid-smelling tobacco death with his words. "Hakkai is heading back East."

Goku's heretical eyes blinked. He then laughed--the loud, grating, excited giggle that always made him sound like he hadn't a care in the world. "Tell me another!"

Gojyo shrugged. "'s true."

"You're full of what makes the grass grow green! Hakkai's not gonna leave us! He's not like you," he said, sticking out his tongue at Gojyo and pulling down one of his eyelids for good measure. The redhead had to be pulling his leg. Hakkai wasn't going to leave! Good God, Hakkai had been traveling with them this entire time, and Hakkai loved all of them so much, and he took care of them so well! The idea was--

But, whenever Gojyo had told him a lie before (like the time that Gojyo had, for about thirty minutes, gotten him to believe that the moon was made out of cheese), he'd always done it with that stupid smile on his face. And he wasn't smiling now. He didn't even seem to care if Goku believed him or not, and with his other bullshit stories, Gojyo had always strenuously insisted on their truth.

"You're serious," he said softly.

Almost too subtly to be noticeable, Gojyo nodded.

"You're really... what did you DO?!"

The hanyo's sharp eyes gave him a death glare. Normally, that would have cheered him up, but it wasn't the usual look that Gojyo turned on him. This one was... dangerous. But he couldn't help but feel a little angry, himself. The last time he'd seen Hakkai, he'd been totally fine, and now all of a sudden he was leaving them? "You idiot kappa, if you--"

Gojyo exploded. His cigarette flew out of his fingers, to curve in a smoking arc through the air and smolder uselessly on the floor. He dropped it because his hand drew back in a fist, and--

The monkey practically had to bend space/time, in order to move out of the way of Gojyo's freight-train fist. The hanyo lost his balance, his entire body following through the blow, and he nearly sprawled out over the sheets. Goku stared down at him, dull amazement seeping into his skull. Gojyo had just tried to slug him. And not any of the play-punches that the hanyo normally threw--that one nearly created a small sonic boom. It would have broken his nose, easy.

His amazement abated his anger. Oddly, the real attack helped Goku to put things into perspective--after all, he spoke the language of battle just as fluently as he spoke that of food. Gojyo wasn't angry at him. Gojyo wasn't even angry. He was hurt. Which meant that he probably hadn't tried to make Hakkai leave, somehow. Which meant that Hakkai had decided to leave on his own. Why, Goku had no clue.

"What happened?" he murmured.

Gojyo stood up. He stamped out his cigarette with his bare feet. A pained wince spread over his features, along with an underlying expression of relief, as if he both hated and enjoyed the burning pain. "I am going to the kitchen. I am going to come back with every case of beer this place has."

"Can I have one?"

"If you carry 'em, why not."

"YES!"

*~*~*

Goku quickly discovered that he liked beer. A lot. It tasted a lot like biting into a piece of bread, only in a drinkable form. That was fine. He wasn't picky.

He took another huge swig. The alcohol wasn't affecting him at all, not yet; this was only his second beer. Gojyo, on the other hand, was pulling the ring-tab off his sixth, and bright red poppies were starting to bloom on his dark, scarred face.

"So is she Kanan?" He'd listened silently to Gojyo's curt telling of what had happened earlier, and this was the one part he didn't get.

"I... No." The cockroach looked down at his beer, then chugged half the can. He burped, something that made Goku cackle again. "I dunno. I don't think so. She doesn't feel right to me." He waved his hand dismissively. "But I guess that Hakkai would know better than me, right? Anyhow, 's nothing that's really wrong... just something... instinctive, I guess."

"Instincts are important," he said, taking another drink. Both their voices were low and near whispers; this was mostly because they could both hear Sanzo's drunken snoring drifting through the walls, and knew that certain death would befall them if the monk caught Gojyo giving Goku beer.

"Not right now they're not."

He shrugged his bony shoulders. "And what are we gonna do about it?"

"Nothing."

"What? I know I didn't hear that right."

"Nothing." Gojyo finished his beer, and absently squashed the can between his hard palms. He tossed it, like an oversized tiddly-wink, on the growing pile of crushed empties. "Nothing we can do. As the fake monk over there would probably point out, Hakkai's life is his own. He can do what he likes with it. Never had to come along on this shit-for-nothing trip, and still doesn't have to if he doesn't wanna." Something bitter zinged through Gojyo's deceptively smooth voice, like the almond flavor of arsenic.

Goku put down his own mostly-empty can. He didn't want anymore; it was sitting like lead on top of the food in his stomach. "What're you giving up for? 's not like you. You normally never give up for anything."

"I'm sick of getting the shit kicked out of me." There was a nasty edge to the words.

"But he's your friend--and if she's not Kanan, she could be dangerous--are you really just gonna leave him with her?"

"Yes."

"I thought you cared about him!"

"I do, goddamn it." Gojyo lit a cigarette. The paper tube trembled slightly in his hands. He touched the tips of his fingers to his forehead, eyebrows drawn together, as if he had a migraine. "I love him a lot. But I am sick to fucking death of him--oh, he's so fucking flighty, he can't decide if he wants me or he just feels sorry for me, he doesn't know if he's afraid of me or attracted to me, he says he wants to love me and then he drops me like a hot rock at the first fucking opportunity, he can't decide if I'm not good enough or too good or some goddamn thing. I don't give a rip about this quest. For all of me, whoever's resurrecting Gyuu-mao could take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I couldn't care less. I'm only here because Hakkai wanted me to be here, or he said he did, and now I'm roped in too hard to quit. But he can quit. He can do whatever the fuck he wants to and there's not a goddamned thing that we can do except for take it. Bend over and take it." He snorted, as though he found his words funny, and popped the top off a seventh beer.

Goku said nothing. After a few long drinks, Gojyo looked over at him, questions in his blood-colored eyes. "What's your problem, you stupid monkey?"

"..." It was a lot of information to try to sort through and digest. Goku, feeling pressured to say SOMETHING, spat out the first thing that flew out of his mouth. "So all those times that Sanzo said you were a long-haired faggot, he was actually telling the truth?"

"I don't know," he said, he voice like shaved ice, "if I want to kill you or him."

"You sound like him, now."

"I do not."

"Do too, do too! Next you're gonna be all--"

"Shut up, bakasaru!" they both said in unison.

The hanyo gaped at him for a few long seconds, then burst out laughing. The alcoholic blush in his cheeks was in full bloom; for the first time since Goku had come back to his room and found the cockroach in his bed, Gojyo looked like Gojyo. Carefree. It did Goku good to see him smile and hear him laugh; the other man's rambling monologue had worried him a lot.

"Besides, Sanzo's just pissed off about someone else having fun," Gojyo said, most of the vitriol tension in his voice dissipating. "He hates it when I enjoy my life. Throws around a bunch of meaningless names."

"But if you like Hakkai like that, doesn't that make you a faggot?" He honestly wasn't using the word as an insult; he just didn't know how else to refer to a guy who liked another guy.

"No, Goku, it makes me a connoisseur of beauty."

He shook his head. "I don't get it."

"Ask Sanzo about it sometime. I'm sure he could explain it to you."

Through the thin walls: "SHUT UP OR I'LL KILL YOU, YOU ASS-ZIT!"

"That monk has the strongest insult radar I've ever heard of," Gojyo griped.

Goku crushed his empties, grinning broadly. Things, at least, felt like they were normal--for the moment.

~TBC~

Next section: "The Wrong Side of the Bed". In which Princess of Pain gives a nod to another pairing possibility (though not because she's a fan), and Goku lays a righteous smack-down.