Disclaimer: We don't own Saiyuki, we can only wish we had a claim to its characters and plot, and we tend to squee over most of the boys, but that's about it.
Warnings: possible spoilers, probably not canon, shounen-ai hints if you squint a little.
Notes: One-shot. Originally an RP between we two crazies Tala1 (who wrote Ukoku) and Drac (who wrote Koumyou.) Total speculation and early-morning wangsty silliness on our parts; also uncommonly short for one of our RPs. Mostly untouched except for the spelling and grammar errors.
Walking the Moon
He woke without remembering going to sleep, without remembering anything but--
(pain. blood. tears. the pouring rain his pouring blood reminding him that he was all too mortal. kouryuu, screaming. kouryuu, weeping)
--too fast to comprehend as he remembered all in a rush who he was and gasped with lungs that no longer needed breath, but held the how and the why of it within them. He could smell nothing, and that frightened him more than it should have. Even blandness had a scent.
He could see nothing either, until he sorted out that memory from the rest of the confusing jumble.
There were walls, and he could not hear the rain. This was not where he had died. Where was Kouryuu? Who was that man, the shape of his face and the slope of his shoulders so familiar in the murky light...
(darkness and moon)
"Ukoku?" he said into the airlessness. The words went straight back to his own ears, the raven-haired man showing no signs of having heard.
-
Ukoku, if he had heard, might have twitched and spun around chanting some sort of spell, but at the moment was only sitting, looking over the Seiten sutra in his hands. He ran his fingertips along the parts unbloodied and stared at the sacred object, thoughts tumbling inhis mind like storm-blown leaves.
Koumyou. Koumyou was gone. Gone. But he had the sutra. He had what he had needed and sought, but at what cost? Whose life?
"Ugh..."
He fell back, holding the scroll up high in the air. "I have it...I have it...but there's no satisfaction. No victory..." Well, it had long been said: if you must do something, do it yourself. Or should accidents befall…what had the youkai thought? No matter, he was dead, anyway. Ukoku had killed the lot of them, the moment he had seen the blood.
-
Koumyou drifted closer, or it seemed like he drifted, because he could see the walls see Ukoku see it all, and even a little way past it and into it if he tried hard enough, and then he saw the rusty stains on what had been his gods-sanctioned charge and weapon for so many years.
If ghosts could be sick, he would have been.
"Why do you want my Seiten Sutra, Ukoku?" he asked again, remembering hate and hating that he could not wrench it from his old associate's
(friend's, he was a friend, a friend)
hand and demand, for he had not yet remembered composure, what Ukoku thought he had been doing, to cause blood and rain and tears.
-
Ukoku's laughter bubbled over, as he dropped the sutra to the side, hand moving to his face instead, thoughts wandering the border of imagination and reality. He wanted to believe he had the sutra, but he didn't, because that meant Koumyou was gone for good. The only man who had seen him truly smile was dead.
"Do you enjoy this, Koumyou?" He asked the air. Oxygen, that was all it was, so he didn't need to fear an answer. "Do you enjoy my weakness? Seeing you always look down on me, always mocking me..." He sighed, chuckles coming to a hesitant halt.
"Do you enjoy this? Watching on and laughing with the gods?"
-
"I am not laughing," Koumyou said, eyes open and narrow and burning. "I am only dead." For a moment sight focused on the dark-haired man's face, pushing inwards as it had pushed at the walls, seeing the pulse of the characters in the kyoumon, the rush and fire of thoughts--though he could not read those thoughts--within Ukoku's own mind.
He twisted without remembering, because this was not something he had ever known how to do in life, and made himself more real than he had been. The Seiten helped--it sensed him, those Words of Power
(with all five, the world sprang into being)
and it did not like being in a different tainted guardian's hands, stained with blasphemous incriminating crimson.
"I was never a god, Ukoku-san; why do you suffer?"
-
The man sprang up at the voice, glancing to the sutra first, wondering if perhaps its power coupled with the Muten had begun to affect him. When nothing was affirmed from that direction, he clutched the edge of the bed, fevered eyes skimming the room before resting on Koumyou's form.
His blood ran frozen; in his chest, his heart skipped a beat.
"K..." But he'd been dead. The body had been reported burned. The sutra was his...there... "Ko-Koumyou?"
-
The ghost let out a breathless silent sigh, the spoken name alone bringing a whole flood of memories that he had no wish to revisit right then.
(childhoodmasterKouryuu)
flashed across his eyes for an eternal second, and then there was only Ukoku, human Ukoku, vulnerable in his grief and the darkness.
"Konbanwa," he said, because he had remembered tact and there was too much he did not want to touch, because his death was still too close and painful to examine.
-
Ukoku stared hard for a long passing second, allowing a soft incredulous laugh, shaking his head from side to side. This was unbelievable.
Then again, he should have expected it.
"And I suppose...gods be damned, you came here to mock me that I haven't won? I have your kyoumon. Yet it feels nothing like victory." He folded his hands together, forcing them to stop shaking. No, he wouldn't admit to fear. That was not something he allowed.
-
Koumyou blinked. He couldn't find any other reaction to those words, but when the sutra's folds shifted and rippled over Ukoku's lap he had to turn away for a second and force back bile that should not have been rising in his throat--but how was he to know what a ghost did or did not do?
"I have never mocked you," he pointed out. Answers, answers, and if he had to stay near the pull of his blood then he would give them. "Why do you need my kyoumon, Ukoku?" And ask his own questions in turn.
-
Ukoku considered it. He found it a horrible sort of joke that he was conversing with a ghost but...what was new? Madness had probably already claimed him. He knew it; could feel darkness eating away at him mind body and soul, and allowed it to do so.
"To wipe that look off your face." The glasses slipped, baring eyes focused on Koumyou's transparent form and glittering hatred. "You always mocked me. Whether you believe it or not, everyone looked to you, Koumyou-sama, and not to me. Birds sang when you walked past; died and ceased for me. Everyone favored you. I had to prove that I was better..." A twisted smile curled the corners of his mouth when he snagged the sutra, lifting it up to dangle mockingly in the spirit's face.
"And I have." His eyes gleamed, flicking to the holy object, eyeing the bloodstains. "I've bested you."
-
"You are a murderer and a thief," Koumyou replied, eyes closed but seeing more than he had ever wanted to, setting incorporeal teeth against the call of the rust-red marks. "If you wished me to mock you, then perhaps I mocked you, but a ghost cannot lie or dissertate; I cannot hate you because I never did, but I can hate what you did. Is there blood on my robes as well, Ukoku?"
He stepped closer with no barrier to resist, no nothing of feeling but for hallucination of what should have been there, and put a hand out towards his own once-life.
"You made Kouryuu cry, old friend."
-
Ukoku scowled. He considered getting up and dismissing this all as a very good illusion, but why not punish them both a little further? "So the brat cried. He always has--even when you found him, he was bawling his eyes out, ne?" When Koumyou came too near, the dark-haired man did get up and step away, clutching the sutra to himself with a warning growl.
Was there blood? He didn't want to look too closely.
He sneered. "Your robes are soiled. And I'm sure that brat was weeping over you like he'd lost the world."
He was happy...proud...he was, wasn't he? Koumyou's death was just a bonus, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
"Retrieve the sutras, but under no circumstances kill their bearer."
He glared at Koumyou, allowing the sutra to untangle and spread out in its endlessly unfolding form, not stopping at the other monk's feet, but going through him as though to insult his apparent nonexistence. "Does it look like I care?"
-
A ghost cannot lie, only see and hear and speak. And remember. "You care," he murmured, stepping through the kyoumon's binding folds, the power and the traces of his death sending him the first feelings he had had in unpleasant throbbing waves
(like bleeding his life out with every heartbeat)
and laid a hand on the dark man's shoulder before he could begin to move--ghosts did not always have to follow Time, either Though Koumyou could not feel the rough cloth under his palm, he could see the tension throughout the man's body increase, see sweat beading on Ukoku's face. "You always cared. All the time."
-
He gritted his teeth, eyes narrowing into slits. "I do not," came the venomous hiss, and he tried to pull away, but found himself rooted to the spot. What…held him?
Guilt, pain, a burning ache in his soul that had never faded, that he couldn't look down on and keep in a neat little box to examine like he had with everything else except the man it was connected to…
He steeled his form against the wall, still clutching feebly at the corner of the kyoumon as it began to slip from his fingers. A corner of his mind screamed danger, screamed for him to take action, to erase this ghost, anything…but he couldn't make himself do those things.
"Rubbish," he spat instead, craning his head back to rest against the reassuring chill of the wall. "I hate you more then you could ever imagine, Koumyou. I hate you. I hate you for everything that you were. I hate you. I HATE YOU!"
-
Koumyou's ghost pressed inexorably closer, robes touched enough by the fall and aura of the kyoumon to shift their drape around his body only the slightest bit, the power dormant but enough to hurt a mere spirit, who ignored them in favor of seeing dark eyes
(iridescent in the way of raven feathers, gleaming and green-hued like forest shadows)
glowering, and know the insincerity threaded through each and every word grown strong, and not move through it but for his face shifting to a set that was grim as death (oh, ironic wordplay) and without the barest trace or possibility of a smile.
"You have never hated me. I have never hated you."
-
This was not real—it could not be real. Superstition or not, it shouldn't have been possible. He pressed further back until he could feel pain blossom in his shoulders from the strain.
"No..." he murmured, shaking his head. "This is a hallucination! Ghosts aren't real! You're dead, that's all!" And yet, he couldn't rip his gaze away from those closed eyes, that haunting mouth shaping its condemnations. "I'll hate you until I die. I'll..."
Without the smile, that familiar slightly mocking look he'd always seen, Ukoku's mind fell short on words to fuel his rage. He was quiet for a long moment before uttering weakly, "Why are you doing this? Do you enjoy me reduced to this, as well?"
-
"I have never hated you," Koumyou repeated, twisting the words in the same way he had twisted whatever still allowed him to be himself and seen, to penetrate the fog of darkness in Ukoku's thoughts and tell them truth, sharper and more painful than youkai claws.
The ghost bowed his head down to Ukoku's, greyed-brown bangs falling across his face like faded sun on water
(kouryuu's hair reflected at the ending of the day, to give way to the night)
He pressed a kiss to Ukoku's forehead, where a crimson chakra would never stain his brow. The black-haired Sanzo would not have felt it, but it burned on Koumyou's lips like frozen fire.
Benediction, from one equal to another, and that was all he could offer, would offer.
Releasing himself from the in-between twisting of the mortal plane, he faded back into the darkness, shedding memories until he was nothing once again.
-
When the ghost vanished, Ukoku slid to the floor like a broken puppet. No longer could he maintain that vengeful hatred towards Koumyou, only the heavy leaded weight of sorrow; an inexplicable upset in the balance of his mind.
He stared at the sutra, the holy words rolling themselves neatly up into his hand, and threw it across the room with a sudden strangled hiss. Fingers dropped to fist in his hair, as he tried his best to forget what had just happened.
He hadn't won. He hadn't bested Koumyou, because the contest had not been real except in his own mind. Because when two bound souls were torn apart, it was the one left living that felt the most pain.
It was he who would carry the burden for the rest of eternity.
-
Obligatory URASAI! (or, random scenes we want to see in the anime proper...):
(NII is smoking at his desk, cluttered with papers, with a little BONSAI sitting on top of all the mess. He has BUNNY-SAN in his lap, and appears to be making it pantomime a conversation with the plant. HWAN is doing paperwork nearby and shooting NII irritable glares.)
NII: Hai, hai. And...? Oh, I see.
BONSAI: ...
BUNNY-SAN: -waves paws, squeaks-
HWAN: -twitch-
NII: Yes, but then of course he wouldn't have been quite as entertaining...hmm? What's that you say?
BONSAI: ...
HWAN: -TWITCH-
NII: Ah, and then-
HWAN: I'VE HAD IT! -stalks over, grabs BONSAI, chucks it through the window-
BONSAI: -splat-
NII: You made BUNNY-SAN cry. That was his new friend...
HWAN: -heaves- You're impossible!
NII: -angles BUNNY-SAN to look down her cleavage, puffing on his cigarette- Hmmmmm?