Title: In that moment
Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Gen-ish 58
Theme: #10 just a memory
Summary: Rated for themes. And a darker side of Gojyo.
A/N: Flagging off the last third with possibly the angstiest fic of the bunch. Here goes.
It would surprise everyone who knew him to learn that Sha Gojyo was not – had, in fact, rarely been – interested in sex.
He had barely been a teenager when he discovered the greatest joy of all – the oblivion that climax brought in its wake. At first on his own, then, as he grew older, with others (although that didn't matter, not really) desperately chasing that moment where everything stopped, nothing mattered, where the partner, movement, breathing, thought, desire, need and even pleasure gave way to the void.
He had finally found his perfect drug, the thing that drink and smoke and gambling and blood-drenched adrenalin could only approximate. And once discovered, he became an addict and a worshipper of that oblivion, which, he thought, was the perfect solution to the nightmare reality in which he always found himself once it faded.
Into that pure moment, he channelled everything he could not face – abandonment and fear and loss and rejection and pain, all of it swirling down into nothingness and vanishing, vanishing, until it ended in an unromantic tangle of limbs, harsh breathing a funeral dirge heralding his return to what he had, for a moment, annihilated. It was that purity he understood, and craved.
It was the perfect solution, indeed, and he saw no reason to change his tactics when he became aware of just how much he cared for Hakkai. He was just another guy, after all, and Gojyo was a real ladies' man. It didn't mean anything that the person he was closest to, respected most and liked best was a man, did it?
Once again, he sought his drug, but maybe it was his natural resistance finally building up, maybe it was his karma giving him crap again, or maybe just his luck; the memory remained. It was a simple memory, just the colour of Hakkai's eyes or the quirk of his faintly real half-smile, or worse, the sound of his voice, coexisting with and contradicting the sound of Gojyo's voice as he murmured half-incoherent sounds of empty passion. Simple memories, and it wasn't even love, damn it, was simply the first connection that Gojyo had had in his too short, too long life that didn't hurt him just by existing; it was only the first thing – the first person – he had known that he didn't, on some level, want to remove from his life, from the purity of the blank canvas that was what Sha Gojyo wanted in his life. A stain of colour
brightredbrightgreenlikebloodlikelife
that refused to leave, for the stupid, stupid reason that he didn't want it to, which stayed because the white embraced it so tightly that it stayed defined, stayed close, stayed.
Hakkai was the only one who'd come back, and on that thought Gojyo crested and fell, his body far too well-trained to allow thought to interfere with its seeking of climax; but the void that had soothed him, drugged him and lulled him through the last decade failed him now, failed him utterly, and he carried that memory of emerald through that elusive moment and it stayed with him as he fell forward and sideways onto soft sheets beside someone he barely knew and would not remember.
It was sometime that night, as he silently, with the ease of practice, collected and slipped into his clothes and then out of the house, that the realisation struck him in full force, and the thought brought him to tears as he doubled over on the road in an almost physical pain.
If even oblivion was denied him…what did he have left but life?