I apologize for chapter three, which is a lot of boring silence and even more boring dialogue. This is the most quiet of all the chapters so far, I think. After things seemed to slip back into normalcy in chapter two after chapter one had been establishing that all is not right in the Ikkou, I felt the need to beat the concept into my unfortunate readers' heads some more.
Hah!
This is also the chapter where the title of this story finally starts playing an obvious part. In a way, this is the true beginning of the story, while the first two chapters are establishing it, setting the scene in my opinion.
I am currently on vacation (or the last leg of it, really), so please enjoy the quick updates while they last, because I'm afraid they'll be a lot more spaced out after this. One kind reader comments that the story has a lazy feel to it – this makes me very happy to hear, as I'd hate to think I was rushing this story. Too slow can be a bad thing, though, so I will do my best to keep the pace at a happy medium.
Please forgive the choppy, almost abrupt language of this chapter; being the most tense scene I have written yet, I felt the change in pace a necessary evil to the rules of proper grammar.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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Would you like another cup?
It hardly needs saying, not when a door left open is an invitation unvoiced simply because the smell of coffee is hanging warm on the air of these few rented rooms, heavy as temple incense where cigarette smoke's left its bite in it.
But I say it anyway, because the familiarity makes this smile genuine, and my knuckles are rapping gently against the doorjamb already. I think it is the knock more than the voice that brings Sanzo's attention up from where he's cupped his hand around a newly lit cigarette, and this is a fact because all the while he'd been watching the newspaper unfolded before him.
We had been lucky with accommodations; our room had an adjacent study, but sparsely furnished.
A table, two chairs.
Two windows had been a matter of unspoken disapproval before and it's the same case now. Two windows in a single room meant three places to keep half an eye on when alone, and for a priest paranoid of youkai ambush, that was as bothersome as...
As bothersome as three followers. To keep half an eye on, when he means to be alone.
Three places. Door. Two windows. A single room with one window, one door was always safer than one with two or none at all; just one eye on either and there was ever one option for escape if the other had unwanted company.
We had become accustomed to the habit of denying the existence of any second, deviant windows by simply pulling the shades tight over them. It was generally agreed upon that the window ceased to exist. It wasn't an option anymore, only the one acknowledged.
And this time, Sanzo had acknowledged the one window by opening it to the hush of evening breeze.
The other did not exist. The door, however, did.
"...Nh." So the priest's answer was given in a one-handed reach for an empty mug off the table, holding it aloft. His other occupied with the frame of reading glasses he reserved for newspapers alone.
It occurs to me that in all this time I am never quite sure just how he wants it - his coffee. Where one day he's been content with it black, I've seen him stir sugar in while distracted by newsprint, or the urgent requests of Goku for dumplings.
Nevertheless, I dutifully pour.
The pot takes a section of the table apart from the other neighboring occupants. A glass ashtray, two now steaming coffee mugs, a silver lighter, a newspaper.
"Do you mind if I join you?" I ask, after the prerequisite pause, fingers cradled on the back of a chair on the opposite side of the lone table. This is an old ritual. I pause, I ask. He pauses, he nods, disinterested in all that does not impede his reading.
Silence undoubtedly will fill the next few minutes entirely if I do not find a tactful way to bring up the topic Gojyo had alluded to earlier; it is my choice whether to be direct or lead to it in the usual manner.
It isn't long into my first draught of hot coffee before I cradle the mug in my hands and decide to keep to tradition.
Cigarette smoke is only an acrid tinge in the air when the night keeps blowing into this silent room.
"Gojyo and Goku have settled down," I attempt. I blame myself for the distraction I've found in how the window looks like a ghost's maw with moonlight clinging to the folds of restless curtains. I expect no response, and I get none.
"I suppose there's little time to enjoy the quiet, though." My fingers are leeching warmth from where it's radiating through the mug from the coffee within, while I'm smiling at it, "Since things will be more or less back to the usual after tomorrow."
This is as close to asking a direct question as tradition would allow. I am, after all, the traveling party's designated swindler.
I do not wait long for Sanzo's response. He sounds suspicious.
"Ah?"
Now I can afford to close my eyes because it is the sound of his progress through the contents of the newspaper that is all I need. Paper dry whispers and sighs white from cigarette smoke have become more real than the nocturnal chirping beyond the open window.
I know without looking up that he's listening when the paper doesn't crinkle in his fingers for fourteen silent seconds.
I give him two more. Only by then will he have become expectant, and he is because he speaks the moment I glance up again.
"After tomorrow," he quotes.
"...Hm?"
"Finish."
"Oh," and here it's fitting to pretend surprise that he expects me to continue, but to push this too far would have him return to silence rather than acknowledge a thing named pointless by my own self-depreciative maneuvering. "It's nothing, but... I heard Gojyo say something about a delay."
Sanzo lifts a hand to smoke, and the curtain by the window lifts like a phantom with a change in the wind. I'm watching his cigarette when I choose to be direct. "Are we really leaving the day after tomorrow?"
The priest's cigarette sits on the edge of the ashtray when he frees his hand to return to the newspaper.
"Ah." Yes. The muted violence of the priest's eyes fixates now on the text between his hands.
"Isn't that a little unusual?"
I watch the cigarette burn until ash drops into the tray in a soundless crumple. The cricket's singing is mere white noise in the silence.
"Sanzo?" There's a warning in how long he's taking to answer, but I am concerned at an alien note in my voice that I thought I had been careful to filter out. My eyes have left the cigarette's slow death on the glass wall of the ashtray, and for a moment, I am anxious if I've overlooked some danger or eavesdropper.
I am still searching my line of questioning for fatal flaws when Sanzo folds the newspaper and stands with a wooden scrape of the chair on the floor. It sounds harsh as a child's fingernails on slate in all this silence.
My coffee is cold in the mug between my palms. I know there is no immediate danger external because he had taken the time to leave the newspaper folded neatly on the table, which is why I don't meet his gaze when he stays a second longer standing.
I don't need my eyes to know when he's turned to leave; the whisper of robes is sign enough. His cigarette is left to its self-destructive nature, burning away into ash.
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