Author's Notes: This reads weird because it was forced. Hope you like it anyway.

Disclaimer: Do not own Saiyuki, the characters mentioned, or any products I might've placed in a fit of insanity.

Warnings: Smoking, cursing, angst.

Personal Questions

I knew this man was crazy from the start. It's probably why I picked him up that night, dragged him home even when he was screaming like a banshee that I leave him alone.

I still don't know why I did it. Maybe I just didn't want to be the only crazy person in this house, to have someone else's nightmares fill it up until the windows cracked and glasses in the kitchen shattered. I always broke things when I was angry or frightened, fragile things that were rooms away, without even thinking about it.

This one broke my arm with a single look. I'd never seen eyes like his before, frightful things that were colder than an icy winter morning, greener than the scum on the bottom of a pond. Hardly the most romantic of ideas, but that's what I thought. It was amazing what kind of awful poetry this man inspired.

After the first few weeks, whenhe figured out that I wasn't going to let him die he apologized for acting as he had and for my arm, which was still lying across my chest in a homemade sling. I blinked. He hadn't even touched it, how could he had been responsible? I'd been in a fight earlier that night, maybe it was broken then and I didn't realize it until I'd lifted his weight because I was too drunk. I peered at him, trying to see if he was hiding something under the sad face he presented to me. But no, he looked human…

I didn't ask personal questions, because that would be an invitation for him to ask about me. I didn't want to relive my life by explaining it to a stranger, so I stuck to simple, every day things, like what kind of jam he liked with his toast or how he liked his coffee.

Strawberry, and he preferred tea with two spoonfuls of sugar…

He never once drank coffee, but he somehow knew exactly how I took mine. I don't remember telling him, but he had figured out what shade I wanted it when the milk was stirred in. I hated sugary things, even fruit, wanted everything bitter, and he cooked that way, though I knew he didn't care for it. I often offered to help him, or to make something he liked every once in a while, but he only shrugged me off and said it didn't matter, that he wasn't himself anymore and he didn't know what he liked.

He was like an amnesiac. He tested everything. He ate foods and sipped drinks until he found something he liked, read every kind of book he could find before he settled on a genre, and watched the world outside the windows as if he'd never seen colors and shapes and people before. He used to spend hours watching me as I lazed about the house, or fixed dinner, or balanced my finances with my hand holding my hair out of my face as I wrote and figured sums. He never smoked, but he didn't complain about the smell when I would sit for hours pretending to be a chimney as we played mahjong.

And then one night, when we were chatting over beer, the doorbell rang, and a snarky priest stole him away.

I'd only found out that I had a friend when I lost him…

My murderer, my mental patient, gone, and I didn't even get to keep the eye he'd pulled out of his own head…

Life went back to its schedule, quiet, long days. I didn't go to bars to steal people's money for rent, just spent the time smoking and glaring at the piles of books he'd left. These were ones I brought home for him; traded for them at the market with ones he'd finished with and decided not to keep, so he hadn't gotten around to reading them. The tattered, previously used volumes were like rancid scars, left by this man to remind me that I hadn't protected what was rightfully mine.

I'd saved his life. That meant that I was responsible for him for the rest of mine. I'd failed him in that respect and I had lost face for it.

There were other things; his toothbrush, the box in the kitchen in which he kept his tea, the rumpled sheets of the bed I'd given up for his use. After sleeping on the couch for three months, I'd begun to think of the bed as his, and I couldn't force myself to change the sheets and reclaim it. It would still smell like him, grassy and full of lies. I liked him for his lies, how easily he spoke them, like a long line of wet paper drawn off his tongue.

I knew the real him now, knew what he was, but not why he was. Yes, he'd killed a thousand youkai, which I didn't consider much of a loss for what those people had done to me, but apparently was enough to convict him. But why? Why would some mild-mannered gentleman snap like that? I knew this man, had lived with him, and through all his restrained emotions, I'd seen that he wasn't as crazy as the common lunatic on the street who raved about speaking to God.

Something had broken him on purpose.

I supposed I'd never know and went back to drinking, flipping through his beloved hardcover of faire tales. It was a child's book, filled with pretty illustrations. He used to hold the book so I could stare at the pictures while he made up his own story about it. He could've been a writer; he was smart enough, very eloquent. He never cursed and flinched every time I used a nastier word than 'heck'.

A shame I'd never asked…

I couldn't stay in the house long. Because I didn't go to bars, I couldn't pay rent, so the landlord threw me out with an unnecessary amount of gusto.

"Fucking half-breed faggot," he muttered as I packed my things and left. I just smiled at how very wrong he was. I'd never slept with the man, never even thought about it. Two men just couldn't live in the same house anymore, not in this society that assumed the worst and blamed you for it. It was always made doubly insulting because of the color of my hair and eyes. People shrank away from me on the street as if I was walking bad luck, or they tried to sell me the worst of their produce when I searched for vegetables, making me always pay double what any other person would give.

It was why I never went out except at night.

But now I was leaving the city, going out past the suburbia that was spreading out like a plague from the harbor city I occupied. I went to the country, where superstition was still rampant, but where I could generally go unnoticed if I wished. I found a vendor on the way that sold dyes and colored my hair black to avoid questions upon my arrival to wherever I went.

The shack I moved into was on the edge of the village, placed neatly between it and the thick bamboo forest. The house was more of a storage area, whereas I lived outdoors, loosing myself in the forest for days at a time to think, or not to think, or try watching the world as he had watched it. Sometimes I read the books I'd brought with me, his whole collection, somehow more precious to me than any of my own possessions.

When I was at home, I lived quietly, kept the place clean, slept on a mattress stuffed with hay on the floor. The place was bare, all of my things kept in boxes piled against a far wall, as if I knew already that I wouldn't settle long. This was my mourning, when I shaved my head bale like a monk and fasted like I had lost the one love of my life.

One could say I had. That man had been my friend, my only friend in my entire life. Those three months with him had been the closest to happy I had ever known. He was the only person who'd ever belonged to me, who wanted to be near me, to talk to me, to hear my thoughts and tell me his own. To have lost that, it was as if someone had stolen my spouse, or my child, or a pet, my best friend…

Not long after I'd cut my hair, about a year after I'd moved in, I left, went to another city. I only stayed there a week before moving again. I lived in various places, not more than a week here or a month there, moving and moving and moving like a man who had lost anything that kept him stable.

I was a cloud without roots to the earth, drifting wherever the winds would take me, apathetic, distant, and sad.

In my skewed and desperate sense or reality, I had begun to think of him as a kind of martyr. Understand that there was little else for me to hold onto, and I refused to let the fact that he was a murderer sully my memories of him. Murder was relative to me, something I didn't think much about, didn't care about. I hated both humans and Youkai; they had both treated me with equal portions of disgust though I was of both worlds. I only chose to exist as a human because they couldn't smell my breeding on my skin. They smelled sweetness, an odd kind of sweat the poured from me on hot days, but they never suspected it was from my very blood. The Youkai would know that first off and would kill me for it, if they dared get close enough.

I was a murderer myself, but only in self-defense, only when they were stupid enough to attack me. I didn't want to die yet; I held the pale flame of hope for better days to come to my chest as if I were turning to ice.

I missed him terribly. It had been nearly four years since he'd left, and I had come to commemorating the day of his leaving with a bag of small apples, the kind he'd always liked. I would buy them, take them home and wash them carefully, then sit down and eat them in one sitting, all fifteen of them. I'd make myself sick off of them, drink my beers and pass out on my futon, get up and cry in the shower as my hangover attacked. It was a horrible way to spent my time, rotting away in this despair, but I couldn't stop, I didn't want to stop.

If I did, it would be as if he never existed. That was worse than having lost him, because if he hadn't been real, then what good was my hope? I might as well have been dead otherwise…

I had just finished haggling the price down with the woman who glared at my obviously dyed hair with contempt, took my money and called me a punk. What did I care? I spent a moment to tie on my bandana, unwilling to stand more stares at my badly-cropped hair and hoisted my bag of apples. I was ready to go home, already turning to go when I heard his voice.

"Gojyo?"

I turned so fast my bag flew out of my hold, my eyes searching the crowd for his face, seeking what I knew I'd lost years ago. This had happened before, hearing him call to me, to see an imaginary ghost of him in the corner of my sight only to have him disappear when I turned to look.

But no…he was there…smiling as me as if he'd never left…

I was gaping, made stupid with shock as my produce was being trampled in the street. He just kept grinning and bent to pick up an apple, rubbing it on his sleeve and taking a bite.

"Always liked these…" he murmured.

I wanted to ask him where he had been, who he was, why he hadn't let me know he was alive, but I couldn't. Nothing would go past my lips.

He looked up at me, green eyes not cold, but flat. The effect made my skin crawl because I knew this wasn't the same man I'd once known. As if he'd read my thoughts, he wrapped his knobby-knuckled fingers around my elbow and guided me away.

"Where do you live now?" he asked, "We can talk there over some tea."

"I don't have any tea," I admitted, my breath coming out of me in a whoosh. It was like any other day four years ago, the two of us walking the marketplace for food or clothes or anything else we fancied. Him for his books, I for my coffee and cigarettes…

"Well then, we must buy some…"

He was so damn cheerful it scared me. He moved about my kitchen as if he'd lived there all his life, never once asking me where the spices or sugar was, just knowing which cupboard to open. I sat at the table like a hostage, afraid to speak or move, afraid that if I stared too long he'd put a gun to my forehead and blow my brains out.

He smelled like a Yokai…

He looked human…

I had no idea how he did this, but I didn't dare ask.

The kettle on the stove whistled and he set it and a plate of sandwiches on the table in front of me. He poured us each a cup of hot water and dumped tea leaves in his, instant coffee grounds into mine. We each took a sandwich and ate, and I realized only now that it was made from the canned ham I had in the back of my cupboard and never ate.

He was watching me, bright eyes intent on my every facial expression, like a cat watching a bird in its nest. It got my hackles up and I growled at him.

"What?" I finally snapped.

"Why did you cut your hair? It was nice before…"

"Why didn't you come back if you were alive? Why did you come back now? Who the fuck are you?" Suspicion raged within me.

"I'm Hakkai…I'm…not who I was before. They gave me a new life; it's a Buddhist thing, not to kill people…" He dared to smile and I nearly smacked him.

"So…what? They didn't kill you?"

"No, no…They let Gonou, who I was before, die for his sins, and gave him a new life to atone for them. Thus, Cho Hakkai was born." He was grinning, so bright his teeth nearly blinded me.

I bit into my sandwich moodily and glared at him from across the table. He seemed to shrink in my lack of enthusiasm and bowed his head slightly as if in apology.

"I should've expected you would move on…" he murmured into his tea.

"I didn't. I'm just pissed that I have to figure you out again."

He looked up at me, surprised pleasure in his face, his cheeks flushing slightly red. He seemed like a little boy on the street who was just presented with a piece of candy, as if he'd leap across the table and hug me if he didn't know it wouldn't frighten the crap out of me.

"Really? You could say nothing but my name has changed…"

"So…what, you still eat those cabbage salads I made?" I tested, my red eyes narrowed with deep suspicion.

He pulled a face, "Heavens no, I haven't touched anything that bitter since I left. They're disgusting."

I snorted and finished my coffee. "Fine then…"

His books are still all over the place, but now they move around, circulate the rooms as he reads them. I like having a housemate again, having his quiet conversations and losing to him at mahjong almost every night. I like having someone to come home to after a night of card games and women. It isn't quiet like having a best friend, but we're working on that. I'm slowly learning who he is again.

For once I'm curious about someone.

I'm asking more personal questions…

Fin Personal Questions

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