Chapter Two

"Yes."

Ukoku Sanzo – once known to the world as Dr. Ni Jianyi – fumbled in the darkness. He had left his doctoral employment under Lady Gyokumen Koushu. His last run in with the Sanzo Party had left him… unsuitable to return to his post. He smiled up at the sunlight of the eatery, a Jeep having rode past him to the Inn a few blocks away. The light of the sun did not reach him. But the warmth did. He could no longer see, but by god could he still feel. And he felt its glow on his arms and on his face.

How delightful it would be to smother that warmth. True darkness.

He remembered the Rabbit Prince of Houtou Castle. Without fail… that light… He had quite a history with that light. With the sun. With the moon. With darkness. And after all, what was more powerful to a human soul… than one's history? Oh yes. Yes, follow that light, and leave behind… everything. After all, just because he had failed with the Rabbit Prince, why not experiment with the Monkey King?

What's precious to you? He smiled at the sunlight that did not touch him, but which he could reach out and smother in the palm of his hand without lifting a finger. This deserved a cigarette. What's precious to you… It felt so good to have cause to think that again. He exhaled a cloud, and it wafted up into the sunlight. You should never let go of what's precious to you…

But what happens, when you are no longer precious to him? What then?

Eh? Genjo Sanzo?

Keep watching, Koumyou. I dare say… it will be good fun to tear away from little Genjo the heir apparent that I could never tear away from you.

...

The lady behind the desk at the Inn was looking through the register book. "It seems that we don't have any more single rooms available. I'm sorry. There are only doubles."

"That's fine," Sanzo said, handing the golden credit card over the counter. It was a miracle that they had made it out of the mountains of Western Shangri-La and into a town that actually accepted the Three Aspects' card. The barter system of working as a town's bodyguard against youkai attacks had worked well enough, but this was simpler.

"Make them next to each other."

"Yes, sir."

Finally, Goku let his fist unclench. Thank god. Still, he had to act as if he was as pissed off as the rest of them.

"Oy, Hakkaaai."

Goku was pulled out of himself as Gojyo moseyed past him to drape an arm around Hakkai. He put a hand up to Hakkai's ear and hissed out, in a very audible whisper, "I got a really good case of wine from that last waitress chick. If you save me from the monkey, I might shaaare."

Goku just rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation. Hell, he didn't need to exact any revenge. Sanzo wouldn't be pleased when he realized that Gojyo had disturbed the roommate arraignment. That, and the case of good wine which he would be missing. Sanzo would be murderous. Sanzo was– already making his way to the staircase that led to their rooms. If he had heard Gojyo – and he had definitely heard him – he hadn't reacted.

What the…

"Oy! Sanzo!"

Sanzo turned, cigarette sticking out of his mouth, eyes half closed. "Eh?" cracked its way out of the unclosed corner of his mouth.

"…Let's go to a restaurant! We haven't been in a decent place for two days!"

"Restaurant?" Gojyo stuck in. "Screw that! I say bar!"

"You know," Hakkai smiled, "we could go to a joint place. I mean, Gokuis about twenty now."

As the conversation continued Sanzo began to look more and more sullen. He seemed to have been looking forward to catching a nap in his newly acquired room, or at least to a few quiet hours with a a local paper.

"Fine. But we're not going to any shit bar."

"WHAT?!" Gojyo was in outrage.

...

Twenty.

Damn.

Sanzo cast half a glance at the idiot monkey as they walked out of the inn and on to the little hole-in-the-wall eatery Hakkai had spotted on the way into town. He isn't even a head shorter than me now,he realized. What is it, half a head? No. At least three quarters. Yeah, he's definitely not just half a head shorter.

Damn.

Goku had been about thirteen-looking when he had found him in that cave. A very, very immature thirteen, but a thirteen nonetheless. And he had been barely higher than Sanzo's waist. Now… he was the same age Sanzo had been when they four had all met for the first time– When the Priest Genjo Sanzo had been sent out to search for the dangerous criminal, Cho Gonou, now Cho Hakkai, who was being harbored by the half-breed, Sha Gojyo.

Goku had been fifteen then. And Hakkai and Gojyo… They had been nineteen. They had been a year younger than Goku was right now. Sanzo shook his head. It seemed like madness. Time didn't go that quickly. And yet, was that really a fair thing to think when Goku had been held in stasis for five centuries.

Screw fair. It was still ridiculous for Goku to now be the same age as Sanzo had been when all of them actually met! And yet… sometimes… it felt as though it had been much longer than the five years since when Sanzo and Goku had showed up on Gojyo's door looking for a runaway criminal. Sometimes it felt like their… acquaintance… in and of itself… had stretched back into perpetuity. Hell, even further back than Goku's time in the cave.

Though, in truth, that was probably just the sheer exhaustion speaking. Sanzo wondered if he would ever get rid of these idiots. How long until their Journey was actually over? They were almost on the border of India now. They had been traveling for two years. Goku and Sanzo had known Hakkai and Gojyo for half a decade.

Damn.

And now Goku was just half a head shorter than him. –Three quarters.

Damn, damn, and damn. He was growing up. Goku, the monkey idiot, was growing up. He had stood stark still in time for five hundred years in that god-created prison, and now he was shooting up much, much too fast. It pissed Sanzo off.

"Reeeestaaaauraaaaant!" Goku's obnoxious voice threatened to blow out his eardrums. He had been dealing with that voice even before he had met the monkey. They were seated and eating, and Sanzo had his gun in hand, his very aura daring either Goku or Gojyo to try and swipe something off of his plate. The routine meal commenced. Chew, glare, shoot, glare, shout, hit someone with a paper fan, glare at Hakkai for laughing, hit, shoot at Gojyo, shout at Goku, chew, swallow.

The uneasy aura he felt in the eatery was one that he just chalked up to his own foul mood.

It was always with a great sigh of relief that Sanzo finished his meal and leaned back in his seat, leaving Goku and Gojyo to forage over the last of the scraps. Honestly, he felt as if eating with this lot burned calories rather than refueled them. He understood that Gojyo had not exactly had the fairest upbringing in the land, but Goku's table manners had been a beast untamable.

"Excuse me."

Oh shit. A female. Sanzo didn't even need to look up from his empty plate to already foretell what was to come. If Gojyo thought he was going to hold them up for another day with his antics, he could rethink that, fast, unless of course he wanted to eat Hakuryuu's dust.

And there went the water sprite. "Why hello, miss–"

"Are you Son Goku?"

Sanzo's eyes snapped up.

She was a little thing– wore a yellow bandana on her head, no older than nineteen. Even so, Sanzo would have said that she looked older than Goku. Then again, everyone looked older than Goku. Or at least… that was he tried to tell himself, even as the years trickled on. But she was clearly a teenage brat. A teenage brat that was giving Goku bated-eyelashes. Oh god.

"Yeah. What's up?" Goku blinked at her, a little flustered. He whipped his mouth hastily… with the back of his hand. Idiot.

She smiled, her hand playing with one of the two braids into which she had pleated her light brown hair. The braids made her look even younger. "I knew it was you! Everyone was saying that the famous Sanzo Party was passing through here." She slid her way around the table, keeping one hand on her satchel so that it didn't bump against any of the adjacent tables. She passed Gojyo's chair, and passed Hakkai's – fortunately for her, she had gone around the table that did not have Sanzo – to Goku, "they say you defeated a god."

Holy mother–Nothing against Goku, but how desperate did you have to be to hit on a kid who looked ready for nursery school?Sanzo took another look at Goku. Definitely.

"I…" Goku looked utterly wrong footed. A vehement flush was dappling his cheeks, slithering across his nose, and spreading itself along his entire face.

Sanzo looked at Hakkai and Gojyo. Well, if he could have mixed Hakkai's look of shock with Gojyo's look of outrage, it would have been an appropriate cocktail of what he was feeling. A profanity-armed comment was about to cough itself out of him– when that little 'twenty' decided to pop its nasty little head back into his mind.

Holy shit. Goku… was legal.

Priest Genjo Sanzo the 31st of China had, up until that moment, been quite certain that he had lived through most of the mentally scarring experiences that this world could offer. That was before this last thought stuck him like a hammer. Suddenly, his mind was full of an explosion of different thoughts, many of which – no, all of which – he had never even dreaded thinking.

Oh god, what if Goku gets a girlfriend? Shit. I'm his guardian-parent…thing. Does that mean… Oh god, does that mean he'd bring her 'home' to 'meet the folks?' I never agreed to this.

No, he had certainly never agreed to Goku's growing up. It had never been in the bargain. He had followed that nagging voice that had called to him all the way up some mountain and to the god forsaken – literally god forsaken – cave where the little heretic child had been imprisoned. He had taken the boy in, not out of the goodness of his heart, but because it was the only thing he could do to stop that nagging, pleading voice. It had occurred to him afterward that he could have just shot Goku, but the realization was late in coming, when they were already back at the Temple and… Hell, what would he have done with the body? Either way, he hadn't shot him. He had raised the idiot. Fed the idiot. Learned the idiot's likes and dislikes by virtue of the idiot's constant complaints. The idiot had become more familiar to him than his own shadow.

And now this familiar idiot Goku had had the audacity to change without Sanzo's permission, or even his realization. When had it begun? Had it begun when Sanzo had separated from Gojyo, Hakkai and Goku and had traveled with the Bishop Hazel Grouse for a while? Had it begun with Kami-sama, the man who called himself God? Had it begun with Homura? With the start of their Journey? …Before that?

"It's nice to meet you, Miss." Goku smiled sheepishly.

She was right next to Goku's chair now, and leaned forward much too close. Maybe if Sanzo had had any experience with women he wouldn't have been so tense. He didn't know. Maybe if he knew about women he could have slipped from his outrage and shock into amusement as Gojyo and Hakkai had clearly done. It was stamped onto their faces.

However, the closest Sanzo had ever come to women was that one time he had been kissed while unconscious – and no, Gojyo had not allowed him to live in happy ignorance of the event – and the other time was when he had woken up to find the Merciful Goddess herself straddling him.

And the Merciful Goddess was a hermaphrodite. Still, it was the closest Sanzo had ever come to a woman, even if it was just the top half. And those two encounters had been reason enough – as if he had ever needed a reason for any of the shit he did – to mistrust women was a whole.

Though, in all honesty, it wasn't as if he trusted men any more than he did women.

The girl smiled two rows of perfectly straight teeth that would have made excellent target practice – knocking one tooth out at a time. "It's lovely to meet you too."

"Ye…yeah." Goku had slumped in his seat, head flat against the back of the chair. Sanzo was giving this chick ten seconds to restore the monkey his personal space. Then the gun was coming out. She didn't. Instead, she leaned forward even further, giving Goku a flush look down her shirt. And, because Sanzo knew Goku just that well, he could just see the thought 'meat buns' floating into his mind.

More. imagery. he. did. not. need.

"Can I tell you something?"

"Ye…yeah."

She then whispered something in his ear.

Several things happened in the next blink of an eye. Gojyo whistled. Sanzo pulled out his gun. And Goku stood up.

"Guys," he said, his own voice a little breathless now. "I– I'll see you at dinner."

She smiled a radiant smile. And then she saw Sanzo. Sanzo just sat there, now feeling like a bit of an idiot holding the gun. He hated feeling like an idiot. Well, he had been planning to get on Goku's case ever since that-all-too-quiet, pain-in-the-ass, two-day ride.

"Yeah? And who the hell said you could leave?" he sneered, letting his eyes turn to Goku only after he had let this ditz wilt a little under his gaze. "Stop giving yourself airs, you black-hole-of-a-stomach. She's probably just got you confused with Gojyo." Normally Sanzo would have been glad of a chance to get the idiot out of his hair, if only for a few hours. But he was irked right now, and that didn't mix well with logic. Right now, there was only one logic: shoot something.

The girl seemed to calm, even as she starred down the barrel of the gun. There was something eerie about that look. As though, while she had felt an initial shock at seeing the weapon, she had in fact, seen things that scared her far more than any weapon. As if Sanzo was not her biggest problem right now. Not by a longshot. "Hardly," she said conversationally, even playfully. "A lot of the matrons like Sha Gojyo. I like Goku."

Dead silence.

Hakkai always smiled, so it was impossible to accuse him of anything now as his face split in half. And Sanzo felt a slight smack of satisfaction at that one. Alright, hearing Gojyo being read his rights wasn't as good as shooting something, but it came close.

"Let's go," Goku said, taking the girl by the upper arm and leading her from the table. And with the tickling of a bell Goku and the girl were gone from the restaurant.

There was plenty of food still left on the table.

...

She wore braids. Just like those Toufa had worn. Just like those that… the youkai girl… from the Oasis… had worn. This girl's hair was lighter, but if Goku slid his eyes closed, he could almost pretend… could almost feel the sand of the desert on his skin… hear the din of the youkai village… the taste of wind-cracked lips–

"Hey," Goku said, stopping. They had been walking for some ten minutes, and were well on the other side of town now. It was some small, open, shabby square. From the residue smell Goku could tell this had been a youkai quarter of town. No one would bother them here, and the girl didn't try to keep walking. The two of them stared ahead at the pealing plaster, arms still linked. "…So… you're saying you have a chakra on your forehead…"

He saw out of the corner of her eye that she nodded.

"Show me?"

She reached up her other hand, untied her yellow bandana and turned to look at him. She had let go of his arm. There, plain as day, on her forehead, was a blood red diamond. Goku could have sworn that he had seen just such a chakra before. Not on Sanzo. Not on any mortal man. But nor on Zenon, Shien or Homura. On… someone else…

Goku's stomach hitched. It was not hunger. "You'll really tell me what I want to know?"

The girl with braids opened her satchel before once more meeting Goku's heretic golden eyes. "Yes."