The railing of a bridge could never beat a window ledge as a place he loved to spend what he termed quality time with… himself. Though the splendid view of the river in the moonlit night made up for the lack of a convenient place to lay his backside on. Sending out a plume of smoke into the night, he appeared to be in deep meditation. Yes, Genjo Sanzo was in a state of bliss, at least for the moment, standing there, alone on the bridge over the river that flowed through the heart of this town. He savored the solitude, a commodity that had become rarer and rarer with each passing day since the moment the crew of four started for the west.
He supposed people would have labeled him narcissistic. Misanthropic. Or to be more direct, an anti-social jerk. People like that vulgar river boy. They judged. They always judged. They were the same wherever he went. The ones who jeered at him as the river foundling at the Golden Mount Temple, and the ones who laughed behind their hands at that uppity loner with no life at Chou An.
The sound of the current was hypnotic, carrying him away as suggested in his childhood sobriquet - Carried-away-by-the-River [1]. The current here raged harsher than the languid flow of the rivers back east. Things (except for those judgers and labelers) can never remain the same, no matter how much you wish them to, he thought as he lowered the end of a fresh cigarette onto the flame of his lighter. He knew he had changed: he needed them more than they ever needed him, he had realized that. Because he was the only one with a personal motive to complete this bloody task. At first, he had contradicted the nihilist inside himself by arguing that restoring world order and the glory of becoming its savior would be enough for those three. As time went by, he managed to disabuse himself of that notion.
None of them cared for the trapping, pure and simple.
What was to stop them if one day, anyone of them decided: No, chief, I've had enough of this nonsense, I'm not going to take this shit anymore, and just skipped town? Fuck Kanzeon Bosatsu and fuck the Three Aspects and Fuck the World. What had the world given them? For Hakkai, a dead wife, a murder conviction plus a new bright outlook on the world - through one single perfect eye. For the river boy, a lifetime of humiliation and aspersion after a prep-course as a sparring partner at his stepmother's hands [2]. For Goku, countless years of maddening imprisonment, the cause of which not even the boy himself had an idea.
He, Genjo Sanzo, at least had a very good reason for finishing the job. Because deep in the bones of this skeptic, he knew that the key to the event on that life-changing night lay in Houtou Castle. Even if he had stopped believing in everything else, he would still believe in this. He would find the true murderer of his master and his own happiness there. And then, even though killing the bastard would not give him back what he had lost, it would satisfy the bloodlust in him.
But he was weak, and he knew that he could do this - easier, and faster if those three were with him. Talk about convenience.
At about the same time he had truly realized his need of them, he had started to scrutinize, to analyze each of the three even more carefully than he ever did, coldly examining every single detail, taking in every single clue. And he saw. Like the days when they both lived together in some town northwest off Chou An, Gojyo simply followed wherever Hakkai went. Hakkai came along because he was indebted, in a spurious ways, to Sanzo. Goku, well, Goku was Goku. He owed Sanzo big-time for his life-changing incidence at the Mount Five Fingers three years ago.
Hence Sanzo had long decided that Hakkai was the most dangerous of the three. It would not take a brain much smarter than a Goku on diet to figure out that Sanzo's intervention had not been necessary to extract Hakkai from punishment for his heinous crimes. Hakkai had been let off simply because the Three Aspects (or whoever on top of them) had wanted to let him off.
A frown appeared on the chiseled face. This train of thought brought him to a fact that wiped out his bliss. In his current life, this added to the only two things that had been capable of robbing him off his peace of mind: indecent river boy and glutton city. Even killing the supposedly menacing hordes of demons gave him perverse pleasure, by quelling down the bloodlust in him. Oh yes, back to the problem at hand. Hakkai had seemed more and more discontented lately. Sanzo suspected that the reason of the sadness behind the perpetual smile could be ascribed to one person: river boy. River boy, it seemed, had not been keeping Hakkai happy, and this, in turn, was not making Sanzo happy.
Sanzo had already attempted to put that problem to right ever since the night after their first meeting with the fierce young demon who called himself Kougaiji. He had just been starting to make his move on Hakkai when the two fools of the group had interrupted them - river boy claiming that the Goku's snoring kept him from sleeping, and glutton city complaining that Gojyo vandalized his feet. After the two had been dealt with the usual way and sent back to their own room with head contusions, Sanzo had continued his attempt, and Hakkai had succumbed - more easily than the monk had expected.
He had thought that that had been enough, that he, Sanzo, could fill the emptiness that was Hakkai's soul. But tonight, he had seen that sleeping with Hakkai had not been enough to keep the man happy. He could not replace whomever it was that had caused that dark void in the first place. The person whose name remained unutterable on Hakkai's lips even as Sanzo, with his hands and body, had brought him to climax. And Sanzo had a good idea who that person might be. Talk about treasure left to rot, flower placed on cow dung [3]!
The frown had now been replaced by a smirk as Sanzo flung the cigarette butt into the river [4] with undue force. He was starting to fish out a fresh stick from the pack when he noticed a familiar jaunty figure trotting out from the inn. Huh, must be the hormones acting again. Well, a good walk in the night will sure cool you down fast, Goku dear.
"Goku dear" had not seemed to notice Sanzo on the bridge at all, because his head was pensively down as he walked towards the hub of the town, which took him in a direction parallel to the river. It's better this way, Sanzo thought. It would have been too soon, after their last discussion (or what Sanzo had termed their eyeball-to-eyeball talk) the night before. I hope this thing gets out of his system fast. The thought of that! He shuddered, and wondered if those two hardened romantic cases might not have fed the boy some of their funny ideas. Yeah, give others the same kind of trouble you two are having now. The more the merrier, eh, Hakkai, eh, shitty river boy? They might have sowed the seed of their funny ideas into Goku's airy head, where it had taken wings and soared higher and higher - and higher - until yesterday evening, when it had turned into a bomb and had been dropped onto Sanzo's head. A stink bomb.
Sanzo rolled his eyes as he recalled his own initial shock, which had promptly been replaced by anger. Not at the boy, but at his own beloved self. He, of all people, should have seen that coming. The time was right (or wrong from Sanzo's point of view), the coincidences were all lined up together like some fucking astrologer's chart, and lastly, he, Sanzo, had been careless. Unforgivably careless. How many casual acts of his must have kindled the boy's lust, how many innocent things said and done misunderstood and twisted in Goku's mind, that had led the boy on even more? Especially in the last few months.
He remembered forcing himself to listen to the stumbling words that had made up the boy's agonizingly awkward confession right to the end. And after that, he remembered taking a deep breathe, hunting for his lighter and starting to build a bulwark of cigarette smoke around himself before starting to give Goku the eyeball-to-eyeball talk. Nobody, not even himself, would admit that it had been as painful to him as it had been to the boy.
Well, the problem of Goku would be solved soon enough - the boy would surely get over his silly infatuation. Hakkai, on the other hand, would be a harder nut to crack [5]. Oh, the challenge that every leader has to face to keep his men happy! Sanzo wondered if any general in the world had a job harder than his. He wondered if any of those generals had any subordinates even faintly resembling his underlings.
[1] Kawanagare Kouryuu (like no decent Saiyuki fan wouldn't know that!)
[2] This Sanzo had learnt from Hakkai.
[3] The first being a Japanese proverb; the second, a Chinese proverb - both describe - you know - the surprisingly uncommon pairing of beauty and the beast. At least in Sanzo's estimation, this was certainly the case between Hakkai and Gojyo.
[4] Environmental rape! Pity the minnow that happened to be around.
[5] Either in *coughs* non-perverted or *coughs* perverted way. Take it anyway you like it.
~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~