I'll get a lonely little sentence with some real bad judgment in it:
Yeah I guess you could come inside-
but only for a minute.
PG-13;
Cho Hakkai / Sha Gojyo;
Cho Hakkai was the place where Tenpou Gensui and Cho Gonou once stood.
Feedback is most appreciated.
Gojyo had a bad habit of picking things up from the ground. One rainy evening during the fall, he found him face down, with his innards scattered splendidly in the dark and bleeding all over his shoes.
"Are you dead?" Gojyo almost picked a stick up to poke at him.
He turned his head to the side and groaned. That was all Gojyo needed to hear to get on his hands and knees in the mud, and piece the broken thing back together.
Three years later, it was the same night they met three years ago. Cho Gonou became Cho Hakkai who was now a demon, but still called himself human.
"Why did you save me?" Hakkai said to Gojyo finally, even though he was a little afraid of the answer he was going to hear.
Gojyo, without moving his head, took one look at him and then the rain outside the window. He sighed, "It's that kind of night, is it."
"I suppose so," Hakkai's laugh creaked. From the way Gojyo slightly narrowed his eyes, Hakkai could tell he did not like the sound of it.
"Why did you save me?" Hakkai repeated. He stared at his hands and wondered why something that reeked of a massacre looked so clean. He wondered why red only reminded him of blood when there were cherries to eat and sunsets to look forward to and there was so much beauty in that colour, if only he cared enough to find it.
Gojyo approached him, the floorboards grumbling beneath his boots. He tilted Hakkai's chin with his left hand so all Hakkai could see were crimson orbs and an empty smile and all he could feel were Gojyo's fingers delicately framing his face. "Because your eyes told me that nothing would make you happier than dying right then and there." He said, "And it's funny but I got so angry all of a sudden and I thought, what the hell makes you so special that you got to die just because you wanted to?"
Hakkai could hear the echoes of a nine year old little boy with red hair and red eyes plastered on the kitchen floor, begging a beautiful woman to kill him.
"Honestly?" Hakkai muttered, long-sufferingly, which made Gojyo put his hands up in surrender and laugh.
"Honest." He answered, "Well anyway, I did a shit job at fixing you up," Gojyo gestured at the rotting scar on Hakkai's abdomen. "That's my fault. Sorry."
Hakkai shook his head in disbelief, because only Gojyo would use his bare hands to shove someone's intestines back into their body to save them and then later apologize for leaving a scar. Hakkai had learned that Gojyo said sorry far too often.
"Please don't apologize, Gojyo." Hakkai said, "It makes me want to punch you."
Just to be irritating, Gojyo answered with a smile that reached his eyes, "Oh, okay. Sorry about that."
Hakkai laughed, and it wasn't the strained hollow one that made Gojyo roll his eyes. "Thank you," He said, one hand covering his mouth, amused. "For not leaving me there to die."
"Are you kidding me, how was I supposed to leave a beautiful face like yours alone?" Gojyo winked and sat next to him on the bed. Their arms touched as they both listened to the rain outside.
Beautiful - that word made Hakkai cringe.
On the inside, he was hideous.
In split-second instances between his dreams, Hakkai saw flashes of withered novels, scrolls written in a language he didn't understand, and weapons a thousand centuries old.
There also stood a man in a shabby white coat who politely introduced himself as the Field Marshall of the Western Army, Tenpou Gensui.
"Do I know you?" Hakkai asked very carefully.
"You don't," The man answered with a cheerful nod, "but you should."
"Vague answers," Hakkai muttered impatiently, "my favourite."
"I am the god you used to be," Tenpou said like it answered all of Hakkai's questions. He watched Hakkai behind clear spectacles and an expensive cigarette, and sighed dramatically, "Oh my. When did I get so stupid and suicidal?"
"Excuse me?"
"It took me far too long to figure out what it means to be alive." Tenpou looked at him dangerously, "Don't throw it all away."
"But you're dead."
The man waved his hand and crouched on the floor next to an ashtray shaped like a frog, "Details, details."
"That's..." Hakkai thought for a moment. He really hoped he understood the situation correctly, "embarrassing."
"Gods can live for a very long time but sometimes... sometimes, being dead is just what we need. After all, what's a better way to remind yourself the beauty of living than dying every once in a while?" Tenpou said, with a sly, irritating glint in his eyes like he knew something Hakkai didn't. "Even gods get tired of pretending."
Hakkai was too much of a coward to tell him that now that he had something to hold, he was terribly afraid of dying.
Sha Gojyo, with his crazy grin and wrinkled clothes, fulfilled all the male stereotypes while also managing to contradict them.
He smoked too much, came home late from gambling his savings and flirted with anything that had full lips and curvy thighs.
One day, Hakkai woke up to a box of lemon green tea sitting on the dining table. "For you," Gojyo said when he saw Hakkai looking at him questioningly, "You said you liked green tea better than coffee so I picked those up on my way home last night."
"Thank you," Hakkai replied simply, because he didn't know what else to say. Gojyo grinned in his direction and put his feet up on the counter. Hakkai told him to put his feet down or he was going to make Gojyo scrub the whole kitchen.
The second time, the clouds were painted grey and it had been raining the whole afternoon. Hakkai kept seeing corpses nailed to the wall and he heard a voice that screamed and whispered and cried out what used to be his name, "Gonou, Gonou, Gonou," like a broken record seared into his brain.
He laid in his empty room, eyes shut tight, and listened to the rainfall and tasted the black and red memories that came pouring down by the gallon straight into his throat. He heard a knock, the door opening with Gojyo, dressed in a black undershirt and old jeans.
"Hey."
He gasped out weakly, "I-I thought you were... out with your friends."
"No," Gojyo said and laid down next to him like somehow he knew Hakkai hated to be alone when it rained.
He clutched at Gojyo's chest desperately, buried his face and he screamed.
In the morning, when the water had dried but there were still ragged tears on Gojyo's shirt from his fingernails, there was uncertainty lingering. He wore a rusty half-smile when he said to Gojyo very sincerely, "I really appreciate that you stayed with me."
Gojyo gently swatted him on the head. "Don't act like you're all alone," was all he said and then he cooked burnt toast and called that their breakfast. Later, Hakkai realized that what Gojyo said was all he really needed to hear.
When he closed his eyes that night, Tenpou had a sad smile on his face. "He's always been saving you. One day, I hope you finally get to be the one who saves him." He rubbed at his eyes and in a quiet voice, continued, "But that might be a hundred lifetimes from now and I've grown so tired of waiting."
Hakkai shook his head, smiling. Gojyo may have been the one who had put his organs back where they should be and stitched his skin back together, but Hakkai was the one who reminded Gojyo about Garbage-Day-Thursday every week and Hakkai was the one who bought fresh vegetables for the beef stir-fry and who stacked the bills neatly on the counter. "I'll take care of him until I get to repay the favour."
Tenpou, who had been radiating tidal waves of guilt and silent panic, relaxed just a little. He closed his eyes and whispered, "Thank you."
Sanzo hated the rain just as much as he did, but he still walked around in the downpour even on days Hakkai felt like he could barely move.
Last month, Gojyo held Hakkai's face between his hands and said seriously, "You work on your little issue with rain storms and I'm going to try not to be afraid to look at myself in the mirror anymore. Deal?" Like their fears had some sort of exchange rate.
"What do you see?" Hakkai asked Sanzo, and the blonde monk with the exasperated eyes knew exactly what that question meant.
"I see the face of a dead man looking straight at me," Sanzo answered, because he knew Hakkai saw the bones of a dead girl, as Gojyo saw the tears of a dead woman, and Goku saw 500 years worth of darkness.
"I don't understand how you could possibly stand it."
Sanzo scoffed at him, like he didn't understand when Hakkai got so weak, "So what's a little pain?"
Hakkai sent Gojyo out to buy broccoli and an hour later, Gojyo came back with two packs of cigarettes and half a bag of cauliflower.
"Is that supposed to be broccoli?" Hakkai asked pointedly.
"Whoops," Gojyo said. "We gotta go though. Baldy and the monkey are waiting in the restaurant outside and I don't feel like dancing to dodge the bullets today."
Hakkai tried very hard to frown at him. Gojyo flung his arms around Hakkai's shoulder and carried the bag of cauliflower which should really have been broccoli, those two words don't even sound alike.
Alright, that's okay, Hakkai decided, while half listening to Gojyo tell him about how he almost tripped on a stray cat and died on his way to the bathroom last night. The sun was out and the streets smelled like sweet coffee and Gojyo spoke with a lazy drawl that just made his laughter sound that much better.
Every time he tried, Hakkai kept forgetting how to be mad at him.
"The problem is, you're in love with him," Tenpou said rather fondly, glasses peeking behind a thick paperback.
Hakkai gritted his teeth and said very calmly, "I'm not in love with him."
Tenpou laughed at his face, "Yes. Yes, you are. You've been in love with him the very moment you saw him, two thousand years ago."
"Two thousand years ago? Really?"
"You've always had a thing for the one with the bright smile and big heart."
"You..." Realization dawned.
"Why do you think I'm here? I've been waiting for so long just to see him again. And Hakkai," Tenpou tilted his head slightly, "now that you've found him, this time, don't let him go."
Hakkai felt lighter than he usually did. He looked for the self-hatred he usually kept in his pocket and found that it was mostly empty. Although, some things never changed. He still didn't have the courage to tell Gojyo a lot of things he really should and he kept telling Tenpou that if he could wait for 500 years, then he could wait for a just little while longer. They were still headed to the West in some god awful mission the Heavens threw in their direction. Sanzo still thought everything was a waste of his time. Goku still knew the right things to say to cheer everybody up, and Gojyo's heavy heart still consumed him. There was still a demon living inside Hakkai's smile.
500 years ago, there was a military officer who lived in a library named Tenpou and a general with spiked hair named Kenren and a god who frowned a lot named Konzen. And then there was a loving and innocent heretic named Goku who brought them all together.
500 years later, there were more burnt skin and broken bones than there were stars in the sky, but they were still there.
Hakkai wasn't sure the exact day he stopped referring to himself as Gonou even in his own deranged head, but maybe it was after that day in the temple he said his new name out loud for the very first time and then Goku clung on his back and said, "I like that better than your old one," with a sincere look behind his eyes.
And ever since then, the small, precious child had never once asked the brittle man, "What's your name again?"
One quiet evening, he realized that he still wasn't sure who he was trying to be these days.
He had a dozen name tags pinned to his chest and he didn't know how to read the jagged letters when they were hanging below him, upside down. On times like these, he stuttered and tripped and remembered things he shouldn't and forgot about the things he should.
Tenpou was an out-of-focus portrait that was sometimes uneven but steady. Gonou was a murderer huddled in the darkest crevices of his thoughts. He wondered if there was a piece of Kannan cemented to one side of his soul. It worried him that some mornings, he couldn't even remember what she smelled like.
He didn't know where any of them ended and Cho Hakkai began. Well, almost.
"Cho Hakkai, huh?" He said out loud, considering the weight of his name on his tongue.
He liked small dragons who try their hardest and fresh apples and the smell of old, dusty books. He liked little monkeys because of their messy hair and loud voices, cranky monks despite their smoking habits and broken hearts. He liked a pretty lady with his green eyes and a pink smile that was so beautiful, it could still make his insides ache. He liked a half breed who carried a scarred left cheek.
He was still alive, despite all the times people said he shouldn't be.
It wasn't anything more than a handful of trinkets he picked up along the way but for now, maybe that was enough.