Halcyon/Hell

By Eline (Kanz' on ff.net)

Warnings: AU fic--the product of the last two months of projects and exams. It's Eline's third year--extra stress produces extra weird fic. Correction: Fourth year and the FYP drove her up the wall and down again.

Notes: Primarily inspired by one particular pic in Saiyuki volume 6 and another in Backgammon 3 . . . And it's from Gojyo's POV because Eline wuvs him (heart). (Argh--I'm turning into a chibi! Too much Yami no Matsuei . . .)

* * * * * * * * * * *

There are times when you know that life was gonna change . . . Like when your brother had to stop Mom from killing you--only she was *really* nuts at that time and it ended with a dead body on the floor and big brother's suddenly on the lam. Or like when you accidentally killed a guy in a bar brawl and got thrown in here for manslaughter, brawling and card-sharping.

The thing was, you never ever saw it coming even though you knew life threw shit at you all the time. You're walking along, minding your own business and THUD! You wind up with a face-full of muck and before you knew it, you were screwed.

Not as fun as it sounds.

So there I was, doing time in New Halcyon, keeping my nose relatively clean and trying to cheat my way into every cigarette stash around. Then, things changed.

It started innocently enough one night. A rainy night where you were glad you had a roof over your head, even if you knew that there was someone else living right above you and someone else above him and so on so forth, compressed into layers and layers made of the dregs of society . . .

"Oi! You've got company!" One of the screws, just outside my little door. "Transfer!"

I stubbed out my cigarette irritably. Yeah, smoking was against the rules, but they closed both eyes to it unless there was some official shit going down. Like when they did prisoner transfers.

"Hey! Isn't it a bit late for doing reallocation?"

"Not reallocation, dummy! It's a new one! The transport got delayed a bit."

"Oh? What's this one in for?"

I just *had* to open my big mouth to ask. The screw grinned unpleasantly. "Oh, I dunno . . . mass murder, was it?"

I didn't know if the moron was lying or not, but just then, someone flipped the switch for my door and there were more guards trooping up the corridor. It was an oddly large number of guards. They brought the new guy--already in his NH greys--right up to my door.

Dark-haired, sort of thin and tall with spectacles. He didn't look like a mass murderer, but I had been around New H long enough to know that appearances counted for nothing.

"This is your new cellmate. Get acquainted or something," the screw told me and then they were gone, off to see about a nice hot cup of coffee and doughnuts once the paperwork was filed. Leaving me here with a guy who could very well be a mass murderer. Gosh. If NH hadn't been a dumping ground for killers and the like, I would've been shocked.

He just stood there, holding his spare standard issue greys and other little amenities they threw for free when you checked in. One minute. Two minutes. No movement.

I flopped back down on my bunk, unsure of how I simply just knew that he was not about to go postal on me. "The other bed's yours. Welcome to Hell. You just keep your hands off my Hi-Lites and we'll be the best of buds, 'kay?"

No answer. The guy had moved to the other bed and sat down. His face was a closed book and I didn't like to read anyway, but something about his silence was just too bloody *loud*.

"Oi," I said, "I'm gonna smoke. Get used to it. Okay? Hey . . . Could you maybe say something so that I know I'm not talking to a wall here?"

"Ah . . . Yes." A mild, soft voice that was just about as readable as his face. He did not say anything else for the rest of the night.

And that was the day that Cho Hakkai walked into my cell and into my life.

* * * * * * * * * * *

So due to the unsurprising overcrowding at NH, I didn't have my cell to myself anymore, but Hakkai, he didn't seem to take up much space . . . In fact, if I didn't look too hard, it was almost as though he was not there at all.

But sometimes, it was impossible to ignore his silence and his sad green eyes. Did you know that he had green eyes? Damn pretty eyes for a guy . . . He was polite, rather quiet and inoffensive. In here, that would've made him an easy target. But everyone steered clear of him because, surprise, surprise, he was doing time for mass murder.

It's always the quiet ones.

Didja know? One month after he came in, I got offered a transfer to another level if I didn't want to stay in the same cell with a guy who killed over fifty people. But in a fit of temporary insanity, I told Mara in the Warden's Office that I didn't mind because he was unobtrusive and compulsively neat. And he didn't even try to snitch my cigarettes. But that was because he was definitely a clean-living non-smoker who kept his hands to himself. Amazing.

Didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't want any girlie mags. And yet I knew nothing about him after the first month. We talked, sure, but nothing important ever came up. Nothing personal ever came up. So I took it upon myself to find out what everyone else seemed to know about the guy . . .

He was a former med school student and schoolteacher. A *schoolteacher*. Well, I'll be damned . . .

(Oh wait . . .)

A schoolteacher who had methodically murdered all the members of this gang that had raped and killed his girlfriend. Then set fire to the place the gang leader had been holed up in and took a couple of innocent bystanders in the process.

Rumour and hearsay, of course. So I had to find someone in the know. One of the guys I played poker with, Tonpuu, recommended me this guy in my block--just two levels up from where I was--who did paperwork for the Warden's Office sometimes because he could actually read without using a finger to keep his place on the page.

Genjo Sanzo was undeniably the prettiest guy in NH. All pale and blond with hands as slim as a woman's. And he was the aloof sort that rubbed people the wrong way because he was a bastard who thought he was better than the rest of us bastards. I never spoke to the guy before, but I saw him sometimes, always followed by the hyper eighteen-year old kid who was his roomie.

I've seen guys hit on him, but they normally wind up looking for their teeth on the ground because Sanzo hits back--hard. You'd think that people would steer clear of someone who was doing fifty to life for first degree murder, right? Wrong. Sanzo was a little too hot for a lot of guys to resist. And no one took his pint-sized shadow seriously even though it was well known that the judge gave him 500 years for a crime that no one ever spoke about when he was old enough to be tried for it.

Saw the tail end of a fight involving those two and a gang of rowdies once. In the end, the ones who had started it needed stitches and couldn't walk for a month. That pair were a magnet for trouble, but the Warden's Office wised up and Sanzo got his pretty ass posted to doing stuff like sorting mail and filing in an out of the way corner. It saved on the medical costs to be sure . . .

So I approached them one evening with caution and a pack of Marlboros.

Pretty Boy got up my nose almost immediately and I wanted to pound seven different kinds of shit out of him. But that changed when he found out who my new cellmate was.

"Cho Hakkai, eh?" Sanzo said, lighting up a cigarette from my bribe in front of me without even offering me a stick. "Aren't you the lucky one."

"Who is he? Ne, Sanzo?" asked his ever present companion.

"Shut up!" Sanzo snapped, but it was more of a reflex action than anything else. "So how much do you know about him?" he asked. "Asides from the rumours?"

So I told him and he set me straight on a few points. It was his sister and not his girlfriend. And the fire in that building had been accidental. About the fifty people? The exact body count came up to fifty-six including women and children. Oh, and twelve casualties. Innocent--depending on how one defined that word--bystanders: twenty-nine in the fire. The D. A. couldn't do much for him--and he wasn't much help either during the trial because it seemed that he wanted to be found extremely guilty.

By the end of that conversation, I was not particularly shocked, just a little more thoughtful as I walked out of Genjo Sanzo's cell and back to my own.

Back to my own cell, complete with my very own mass murderer. He cooks, he cleans and he knows something's up the moment you walk through the door.

A look. Too brief to be a stare. Then he's looking down at the book he was reading again only he's not reading it anymore.

"You know I killed a lot of people."

"That's life, ne?" I shrugged and dug out my Hi-Lites. "One person, two people, many people. Like any of us in here can bitch at you about it."

"Ah, but what are you in here for?"

"I was unlucky enough to be in a fight with broken bottles involved. And then I was unlucky enough to kill a guy in that fight."

"I don't have any excuses," he said in that soft, polite voice of his. "First degree murder even though most of them were not my intended targets. The D. A. told me to plead insanity. But I don't know what sanity or insanity is anymore."

"Yeah, so?" I blew out a neat little smoke ring--something I had learned to do in the long stretches of boredom that threatened to turn the mind into porridge. "Know the guys next door? Kepple and Ren? Kepple killed his own wife for the insurance money and Ren tattoos himself with a toothbrush whenever he gets one sharpened. And Mooky D. on level five--the one who can't take too much sugar without feeling the need to carve his newest song in the nearest wall, or the nearest person? As you can see, sanity and morality are in short supply here."

"You don't mind then . . . or are you merely pretending to be jaded?"

I gave him a long appraising look out of one corner of my eye. "Saaa . . . you're so sharp, you're gonna cut yourself one day. But as far as I can see, it's going to be a paper-cut. Unless you go psycho after drinking coffee or alcohol--which is fine by me because it means more for me in the end."

Was that something approaching a smile?

"No, Gojyo-san, I just don't have a habit of drinking. Catholic upbringing and lack of money, you see."

"Ah-ha!" I crowed triumphantly. "I knew it! Never fear, you'd be corrupted in no time--just stick with me . . . Know how to play poker?"

Catholic guilt--it figures. And then I realised that he had volunteered something about himself for the first time.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Unobtrusive as Hakkai was, the eventual realisation of the change came one fine day about week later.

By "fine", I meant that it wasn't raining. We got loads of rain around here, so a day when we were allowed to go out into the quad when it wasn't raining was fine with us. It wasn't all sunshine and daisies, but it was enough.

Hakkai--that incurable bookworm--was probably at the library trying to find something readable. As for myself, I was prowling for a game of chance. Sometimes, chance needed a little nudge here and there to make it go my way. After all, I had a nicotine habit to feed. What I could buy with my limited hard-earned credit was just enough for me, but not enough if I wanted to trade for stuff.

Out in the quadrangle, I found my first two easy games and pocketed some Lucky Strikes and a new lighter. The day was still young, so I slowed down and watched some guys playing footy in the sad excuse for a field. The grass always gave up after a week or so and it wasn't as if it was being trod on that much--probably drowned because of the rain. There was some shade provided by the high wall separating the inner sanctum of the Warden's Office from the rest of NH.

Beyond the buildings was the outer wall, not to keep any barbarians out but to keep all of us in. Duh. Looking at the walls was a mistake--the damned things loomed up over everything else--a nice, solid reminder of how small the universe was for the likes of us. Maximum security. That was why they could be lax about security behind the walls. Doesn't matter how hard we kicked at each other because none of us were getting out.

"Che . . ." I lit up and glared at the figures running around on the pitch through the smoke. In the next minute, I was nearly run over by a fifty-kilo cannonball.

"Oi--watch where you're going!" I snapped.

"Whoops. Sooo-rry," the other guy said indifferently. "Was in a rush--there's a game on!" And he was off to get a closer view of the pitch.

It was that kid--what's his name again--Son Goku? And wherever he was, Sanzo would not be too far away. Yep, just behind me in the shadow of the East Tower, reading a paper and pointedly ignoring the passes being thrown his way. That was all that most people tried if they valued keeping their teeth in their original positions. He did deign to notice me after a while.

"You should tell your friend to watch his back. Some of his old acquaintances just got transferred in today," Blondie said without looking up from his paper. "And if they find him, it won't be just to pay a courtesy call."

"Oh? I'll pass it on," I said just as casually and slouched against the wall. "Why should you care?"

"I don't. There's always more work to do and tighter security after someone gets knifed in here. I couldn't get any Marlboros for a week after the last time."

Yeah, I remembered the last time that happened. A week without even a dog-end to see me through because someone wanted a piece of another inmate for whatever reason and got busy in the workshop putting an edge on a piece of plastic. They both got a week in the East Tower, if I remember correctly, and the screws started checking for things that could be large enough to be filed down into a weapon.

"Keep me posted." I'd probably have to bribe him with a new packet of coffin nails again, but a direct line into the Warden's Office would be cool.

"See those four over there?"

"The bad hair-cuts at two o'clock?"

"Correct. Those are the ones you should watch out for in case they decide to stop by your place."

"Much obliged. I got only some Lucky Strikes and my Hi-Lites on me now--if you want Marlboros, you gotta give me some time to work the field."

"Ran out of lighter fluid. I'll settle for a lighter."

"Sure." I passed over the recently procured lighter. "You play poker? I know loads of guys who are really bad players just waiting to be set up."

Sanzo lit up and gave me a glare that was in no way diminished by his slightly nerdy reading glasses--plastic frames only here.

I shrugged. "Guess not then."

"I'd play, but the stakes don't usually interest me," he said after a moment.

"It wasn't just for the fags, eh?" I couldn't resist asking.

The look I got for that crack was extremely nasty to say the least.

"Hey, I don't play for that sort of thing . . . You can ask Hakkai. He plays pretty well for a good Catholic boy." Actually, Hakkai could wipe the floor with me in most card games. As a team, we could've sponged off everyone else here--except I had a reputation to maintain and his reputation tended to drive people away. Far away.

"Maybe if I'm bored enough," was Sanzo's reply before he went back to his paper. So much for being friendly . . . I took myself off to do some serious work.

Five games--one of which had been honest--later, it was dinnertime. Let's just say that it was a force of habit that actually brought all of us trooping down to the canteen. The routine in here gets to everyone, no matter how crap the food was. I spotted Hakkai when he wandered in, blank and inoffensive as usual. I elbowed my way over, tray in hand.

"Yo."

"Good evening, Gojyo-san."

There were advantages to sharing a table with Hakkai. For one, no one else would be sitting there. So there was no problem with people with messy table manners either.

And there was that guy . . . "Ikedakemasu" followed by the polite clink of utensils. I think I was kind of fascinated by how he could just sit there, an oasis of obliviousness in a sea of mind-numbing boredom, eating NH rations like it was afternoon tea on a Sunday.

I came to the conclusion that I had a complete weirdo for a cellmate.

"How do you do that?"

"Pardon?"

Argh, that must have slipped out . . . "I mean how do you . . . Ahhh--just forget about it."

He blinks once, then goes back to the methodical sectioning of the vegetables. "You must have won a lot, Gojyo-san. You look like you've had a streak of luck."

"Aa . . . Lots of newcomers to fleece." That reminded me . . .

I propped myself against the railing of the relatively quiet tier we were on for a better view of the canteen. Almost forgot about keeping an eye out for trouble . . . But trouble, in my experience, was never hard to find.

"Oi, Hakkai--over here . . . d'you recognise any of the new guys down there?" I asked, discreetly pointing out the four who had just appeared on the tier below.

"No . . . should I?" His eyes widened slightly in confusion first, but he caught my meaning pretty fast. "That . . . I can't remember much from that time . . . There were so--"

"Never mind. Just you keep your head down and avoid them." I didn't know what I was doing, sharing space with a liability like him. Helping someone like him.

* * * * * * * * * * *

End Part 1.