DISCLAIMER: What's the purpose of this tradition, really? To keep us humble? I admit it freely: I don't own Saiyuki. Consider my tou koued. To remind us not to sell to each other for money? Hey, all I'm looking for is a nice review. Or, you know, however many you nice people feel like... um. Yeah. Please? (hopeful smile)
Review responses below.
Notes: I hate my hormones. In fact, I hate your hormones. In fact, estrogen in general is really pissing me off today. I intended to make a disclaimer here about how Kanan's opinions are not my opinions. Which they really aren't; I kinda like Yaone, for one thing. But instead of apologizing for her, I'm going to cheer her on. She's been through her own very special kind of Rough Stuff, and if she came out thirty percent catty and sixty percent bitch, (switch that around and you've got Hakkai) I figure she's entitled.
WARNINGS: spackle or AU fic, as you like. There will be hormones flying everywhere. Especially in the next chapter. Er, and this is also the Fic Where Nightfall Tries To Get Over Her Dislike of Foul Language (and, er, seems to have succeeded.). If it's too much, I apologize.
--------------------
In Hir Wicked Style
by Nightfall
Part ten: Kanan
--------------------
"Tonight, I believe, we may be allies," Gonou smiled blandly. Kanan was getting very tired of that expression. Not to mention the way everyone was letting him get away with it.
She remembered meeting him again for the first time. After a dizzying morning tight-roping the transfer to a new orphanage, the brittle, bitter construct of her bright spirits unhinging itself, falling to numb disbelief against the slack-jawed, round-eyed mirror in the back row. That wistful smile, never quite believing itself, heaven's brief answer to her outrage. Almost the same face now, almost the same smile, her dharma and nirvana turned shield and sly dagger under his shadowed, distant eyes.
The youkai prince barked, "We're under truce tonight, Cho Hakkai. Don't mistake it for an alliance."
Poor Sanzo. Kanan could feel her getting more irritated every time the prince spoke. Sanzo was firmly of the opinion--as to whether or not sour grapes were behind it, Kanan wouldn't speculate--that the dead should stay dead.
Kanan agreed. She would have been much happier without the coward Yaone, herself.
That had been a most satisfying day. It had started with Honshin, Kaikara and Jien teaching manners to some extremely rude youkai men with limiters, which had been a pleasant exercise for them. When the mouse of a waitress to whose benefit they'd been enjoying themselves had turned out to be not only a youkai and a poisoner but a breathless, spineless damsel ready to give up everything, her life, after one failure... well. Kanan had been more than happy to help her out with that while Sanzo sutraed and shot the pompous hero who'd answered the assassin's distress. Then they'd found out whose son Short Dark and Humorless was.
It had been a most satisfying day, and Kanan couldn't for the life of her understand why the men had deprived themselves of it's simple pleasures.
"If you'll permit me to continue, Kougaiji-san," Gonou said with razor politeness, "we do have a common purpose. For the moment."
"You just haven't caught on yet 'cause saru slapped you silly," Gojyo said helpfully, grinning and lounging, "Not 'Kai's fault."
"Shut up, shrimp," Jien told him, mostly amiably.
"Ooh," Gojyo jeered, grinning back and glowing a little behind his casual snideness. "Pay attention, chimp. If you eat aaaall your vegetables and exercise reeeeeeeeal hard, you could grow up into a big ol' baboon like this guy."
"Silverback," Jien corrected him placidly. His prince raised an aristocratic eyebrow, and the assassin also shot him a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. Kanan had to dimple a little herself. Jien was a wonderful friend and very dependable, but he was never going to be anyone's idea of an alpha male.
"I'm not a--why didn't you, then?" Goku started indignantly and ended curiously.
Everyone except the other children and the prince chimed, "Cigarettes."
"Is that why you're so short, Sanzo?" the children asked (Lilin used a ruder title), and then glared at each other. "I'm never smoking!" Kaikara added virtuously.
"Me either," Goku nodded.
"Am I expected to clap?" Sanzo drawled at the same time that the blond man exhaled impatiently and Kanan and Gonou chorused, "Neither."
"I'm afraid it may be too late, in any case, Goku," Gonou said after shifting his amused smile (at last, a real expression!) from Kanan to his young friend. "Second-hand smoke is just as bad."
"You chimney-faced kappa, you stunted my growth! Give it back!" Goku demanded, hurling his empty teacup at Gojyo while Kaikara cast a tempted look at Sanzo.
"Why don't you blame Sanzo?!" Gojyo protested indignantly, dodging. "He's, like, three chimneys!"
"Children's table!" Kanan sang out. "Four places can be arranged just as easily!" Gonou sent her a warm, appreciative look, and she could have sworn she heard no less than three growls.
Sanzo put her gun away as they settled down, and nodded curt thanks at Kanan for sparing her the bullet. After a moment, more grudgingly, the other priest followed suit.
"Your man mentioned a common purpose," the prince said stiffly to the man Sanzo, who grunted unenthusiastically.
"Did you mean getting us home, Gonou?" Kanan asked, meaning, It had better have been.
"That's exactly what Hakkai meant," Gojyo said, glaring at her.
The prince narrowed his eyes suspiciously down his long nose and observed, "Your presence here is none of our doing."
"Of course that's true," Kanan smiled warmly at him, kicking Honshin under the table when the kappa started inching away in alarm. "And neither is yours ours."
"Dead man," Sanzo added, like a name, as though Kanan had failed in politeness by not addressing him properly.
"And neither is your lady mother any of our concern," Kanan went on, kicking Sanzo's ankle this time. Surely a youkai prince wouldn't be so immune to subtlety. Kanan was certain he would have taken her meaning without Sanzo bludgeoning him over the head just to make sure. "But your royal father, I'm afraid, would be if we were to stay."
"Jadeface is a menace," Honshin agreed. The other Jeep's passengers looked at her sharply, and paid close attention. Perhaps they hadn't had the pleasure of the Empress's direct attention yet. "And that pervert she calls an underling is worse, and while you're her pawn you're our ow!"
"Kaikara?" Kanan asked sweetly. "Refresh Honshin-nee-chan's memory, please. What was our agreement about negotiating with courtiers?"
"Shut up and let you do the talking," Kaikara recited, with a superior smirk for Honshin. Gonou's party exchanged an amused glance.
"And why was that?"
"Cause they get insulted when you don't talk in riddles."
"Good monkey," Sanzo drawled, tossing her a pickle.
The girl's face lit up. "Thanks, Sanzo!"
"Hey, Sanzo, can I have a pickle?" Goku asked eagerly.
"Ask your keeper," the blond droned. For someone with such excellent posture, he fairly exuded slouch.
The boy looked stymied and resentful for a second, but then he shrugged. "Can I, Hakkai?"
"Well, I suppose it's only fair," Gonou said cheerfully. "But if it's really fair, I think you should earn it, don't you? Tell me, when we have guests to dinner, what's our job?"
The boy sighed, and grudged, "Fine, then can Lilin-kun have one, too?"
"Lilin-chan!" the little youkai corrected him--loudly and as one who had been insulted, and yet somehow still perkily. Kanan rather envied her energy. The world became quick and air thin for her only in battle.
Goku's batter-colored eyes widened in exasperation, as though he'd been trying to do her a favor, and he opened his mouth.
Gonou deftly tossed a pickle into it, and passed the bowl down the table to the young princess while he was munching. "I don't see why not," he said firmly. "In any case, Kougaiji-san, as I said, I think we may be allies in this. As the ladies are far more likely to be our allies than yours in the long term, should they remain here. Are we agreed?"
"Perhaps," the prince sighed, rubbing between his eyebrows in defeat.
"See, Kanan?" Honshin said lazily, stretching out onto Jien's shoulder and hooking her chin over it. "Straight talk does it, too."
"Oh, is that what that was?" the big youkai asked, very quietly, with Jien's own yellow-feathered grin on his face, and the two of them started snickering at Gonou, who shot them a thin smile which was barely tolerant, not at all impressed, and almost worthy of Sanzo. Gojyo's face was frozen a careful blank.
"Then," Gonou said, turning back to the prince and pointedly ignoring the irreverent Shas, "the only question is how."
The assassin was looking at him out of large, sympathetic, burgundy eyes. Kanan had an urge to place herself between her brother and both the assassin and Gojyo and hiss, 'My man,' but first, she wasn't Honshin, second, Sanzo would almost certainly take it badly, and in any case Gojyo and Yaone were on different sides of him.
"How did you get here, Cho-dono?" Yaone asked her with warm concern. Kanan wondered whether she would have been so friendly if she'd known that Kanan had bored a qi-blast right through her brain, leaving a welling red hole like a chakra in the breath before she shattered into dust.
"Homura," the man Sanzo said briefly, possibly feeling that she would have taken too long to explain. "They came though the hole he made."
"I can summon a creature from the demon realm," Kougaiji said, as though someone had already asked him to do something impossible, "but it returns on it's own."
"Actually, our good buddy here already knows how to do it," Honshin told him easily, grinning at Gonou. "I know that look."
Gonou scratched under the eye without the stupid monocle and grinned sheepishly at her. "Well, I did have a thought," he said with an embarrassed little laugh. "I don't know whether it will work..."
"Shut up," his Sanzo said forbearantly, "or keep talking."
Chuckling, he agreed, "Well, all right, Sanzo. But it depends, Sanzo-san. Homura had two sutras--in this world, at least. In your world, if Kougaiji-san wasn't there to claim the Bright Land's sutra...?"
Sanzo frowned at him, and shot a suspicious glance at her irked counterpart, who droned, "I'm retrieving my property," and one at Kougaiji, who looked faintly smug. Taking this as a promise of good behavior, Sanzo slowly reached into her sleeve and drew out a tightly wound scroll, bordered in blue. Her counterpart made a sour (but not covetous) face and she looked marginally less surly as she put it away.
"Excellent!" Gonou said happily, beaming indiscriminately around the table. "Then we shouldn't have any problem."
Five minutes later, phrases like 'Are you insane' and 'If you think I'm going to' were being tossed around like confetti, and even Gojyo looked ready to strangle him.
-------------------------------
OMAKE!
--The SEME At The End Of This Fic--starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU
Hakkai: Well, immobilizing the pages didn't work, but suppose we try this...
(aims qiball at page source)
Tenpou: (impressed) My, my, Hakkai-kun! You're a very quick study!
Hakkai: Well, it just occurred to me; I thought I'd give it a try.
Tenpou: Keep this up, and we might be able get my old job back... It seems, however, that I still have resources of my own.
(opens the door)
Konzen: LEAVE THE FUCKING CODE ALONE, YOU SONOFABITCH! YOU'RE JUST MAKING MORE PAPERWORK! YOU'RE NOT THE ONE WHO HAS TO WORK IN QUINTUPLICATE, YOU INCONSIDERATE BASTARD! (stomp stomp thwack storms off)
Hakkai: O,O Sanzo... high heels... lilac... hair... (swoon)
[end part ten]
Review Responses:
solaas: It [the omake] keeps going on and on, too. I'm having to add the Homura explanation as a separate chapter just to stretch it out! I mean, I already have the whole thing written (unlike the actual story), and as you'll see in a minute, parts of it really can't be compressed. Sorry about the EftW--I'll try to fix that when I add these chapters.
DoSet: I feel like a dealer (cries)! (snickers) I'm not quite sure what you mean by Kanan and green, but I'm glad you enjoyed whatever it was! (laughs) I'm also glad you're enjoying Honshin. She's kind of the hentai-fangirl-representative, which is fun to include.
incandescens: Someone got that! (is thrilled)
Me-Nuriko: doesn't he? (grins) He's all preoccupied with Sanzo. Inne precious?
queasy: Heh. Poor Hakkai, this time... Hope this chapter felt longer!