DISCLAIMER: I own Saiyuki not. Except for the first three volumes. Score!
Notes: Well. Special thanks to incandescens, but it looks like as though where action scenes are concerned I'd better stick to my day job. Depressing thought, considering my day job... Review responses to Photosynthesis and to chapter 10, which I unfortunately forgot before posting last time, will be at the bottom.
WARNING: this chapter is as weird as the last one in an entirely new and different (and in my opinion creepy) way. We WILL be back on track next time (although it'll take a little longer to get back to the plot); this is NOT the main pairing for the story--it's just that this scene has to happen before we can move on. But, OptiMoose is still safe, no matter what it looks like, and there's a good 8-plus single-spaced pages of Hakkai's underhanded, smitten, angsty POV coming up next, so just hang tight.
Hir Wicked Style
part 12: Sanzo
by Nightfall
When the walking dead had returned to their camp for the night, Sanzo found Cho Hakkai down at the stream, looking young and colorless in his nightshirt, staring a hole through a basket of bloody clothing. It was nearly dark and they didn't know what animals were in the area, forget youkai. She wouldn't have been able to smell one next to her with Kaikara and that Goku boy in such close proximity, overpowering everything with their combined aura of itan, and if Sanzo couldn't, an ordinary man like Cho certainly couldn't. So what she said to him was, "Are you trying to pick a fight?"
He blinked slowly. At the end of it his eyes were less huge, but only slightly less blank. "Actually," he said, "I thought I'd do some laundry. Is there something you need, Sanzo-san?"
"Yes." She hated having to admit it, though, and she locked resentful eyes with him to make sure he knew it.
"Oh, well, if you'd like to add your robe to the pile," he began. Realizing somewhere in the middle that she had no tolerance for joking at the moment, he amended, "Tell me, then."
"Fix my healer."
He looked at her straight on, then, surprised. "Kanan? But she seems to be doing--remarkably well, in fact," he smiled wistfully.
Sanzo snorted. "I've never known her to be 'well.'"
"This unworthy person isn't exactly the poster child for mental stability himself," he murmured wryly. She wasn't sure whether or not he was actually talking to her.
"I don't care about you," she said bluntly. "But you're the one who can help. Of course, it's your choice. If you aren't willing..."
"Please, please," he waved a hand deprecatingly. Again, she wasn't entirely sure which one of them he was deprecating. She probably deserved it for that clumsy attempt at emotional blackmail. "Willing is not the concern. Sanzo-san?" he asked after a moment. "May I ask you a question?"
"Another one?"
"About Kanan." She grunted, and he dipped his head in thanks, then propped it on his arm, on the basket, and absently thumbed his earlobe. The part of Sanzo that was always watching noted with interest that the pseudo-siblings had mannerisms they didn't share. "I can see that she didn't meet you for the same reason I met Sanzo. Then why did she merit the Sanbutsushin's attention?"
"Genocide," she told him without mercy.
She received no horror, though, no outrage, no disbelief. He only looked perplexed, and then more so, and finally it burst out of him. "How?"
Her mouth twisted. "Pure indignation, I'd say."
"Yes, yes, I meant, physically how."
"Qi," she answered, taking pity.
"Che," he sighed, looking vaguely annoyed. And then his long lips quirked, and he murmured, "So much for the direct approach."
She blinked. "I meant -qi.-"
"Yes, I know," he reassured her, smiling, his mind somewhere far off. "A, ah, a private joke. But Sanzo-san, I really don't know what you expect me to be able to do to help her."
She glared at him, and he blinked, turning wide-eyed to her with the same knee-jerk sensitivity to her intensity that was considerably less annoying in Kanan, who had a right to it. "What," she asked with deliberate precision, thinking that the slutroach would have been able to insinuate this better, "could she do to help you?"
He recoiled instantly. And she'd thought he was wide-eyed before. "Sanzo-san," he said stiffly, coldly, in a courtesy to curdle blood and freeze bone. She felt more comfortable, now that he was acting like a Cho. "Is it your business?"
"Very much my business," she said, still heavily and deliberately.
The arctic fury didn't entirely dissipate, but it cracked a little when his visible eyebrow leaped towards his headband, grey in this diminishing light. "Is it so?" he asked, a little more archly than was in her opinion necessary, his littlest finger twitching on the basket. She nodded curtly, and the temperature plummeted again with his slitted eyes. "Then I must confess myself disturbed, Sanzo-san, that you would make such a suggestion."
"I'm the one with the right to make it," she snapped. "Your ghost's in my bed already--I want it out. And I want that dead youkai bastard out, too. You can do a lot of that."
"So pragmatic, Sanzo-san," he noted pleasantly, nearly hissing.
"So fraternal, Cho-san," she spat back. "She's not yours to protect." His lips disappeared. He wasn't hers to protect, either, and so she pressed on ruthlessly. "I want you gone because you're in my way. I'd share with you just for that. Him I want gone because she can't talk to about any man but Jien without bracing herself, she can't look at any couple without flinching, and I'm fucking sick with it." After a moment, she corrected, "Of it, I mean."
"I know what you meant," he said, his face drained to a sick pallor. "I see. Of course--but Sanzo-san, there's another complication. I--that is to say, I'm not exactly--"
"I know you're not free," she said impatiently. "If he's such a selfish bastard as to not want this for you when -I- can see you bleeding out your eyes, you can tell him I put a gun to your head."
"You would, too," he chuckled absently, still pale, and then blinked. "Hanh?"
"Don't bother acting innocent," she snorted. "That kappa's obvious enough for you both. Not that he has to be. If he bites her eyes out I'm holding you responsible, by the way."
Suddenly he wasn't pale at all anymore. In fact, he looked positively intrigued. "Is he now," he breathed. His eyes were painted with the most bizarre expression she'd ever seen: a radiant, almost crazed look of disbelieving speculation. It was too wild for him; his affable scholar's face could barely contain it. "I suppose one can put some stock in an outside, unbiased viewpoint."
"Pathetic," she told him, chewing down her smile.
"Oh, well, perhaps," he said cheerfully, still lit up at the chakras with that manic glow. The exuberance with which he started scrubbing at a really ugly half-cape was completely out of place. She recognized it as their Goku's after a minute.
"Hakkai," she said when she couldn't stand it anymore, instead of clobbering him with her fan.
He looked up. "Hm?"
"Shut up. You're tone deaf."
He shot her an amused and disgustingly happy little quirky look. "No one's forcing you to stay, Sanzo-san."
"I'm not going anywhere until you've done what I want," she reminded him, and blinked. That was the fastest mood swing she'd ever seen, and Kaikara had had some good ones in the past. Albeit mostly with the fulcrum in her stomach.
"Ah," he said eventually, dull and gentle and careful again, and started washing a very familiar looking robe with precise hands.
"You could consider it payment for information," she suggested after a moment, taken aback by his sudden withdrawal.
He looked at her sharply, not smiling. "That kind of vulgarity doesn't suit you at all, Sanzo-san." Perhaps in apology, he added, "It's a strange thing. My mind seems to be too small to hold them both at once."
"That's just pain," she assured him. The door of the inn behind them was opening, and someone who didn't set her alarms off was walking up to them. "It diminishes as the stitches take."
He flashed her a humorless little smile. "Mm," he commented noncommittally. She'd known Kanan long enough to hear 'stop nagging; I've already agreed' in it.
"Sanzo, you're giving medical advice?" Kanan, standing at Sanzo's shoulder, scolded in the kind of dangerous voice that was more than half giggles underneath, before turning to her pseudo-brother in concern and asking, "Do you need it, Gonou?"
"Ah--no, thank you," he smiled up at her. It was a painful kind of smile, but mostly it was an echo of his thanks. "Nothing's reopened. It's only that Sanzo-san made an, anh, a somewhat unexpected proposal."
So he really was going along with it. Good. All those little splintered instants of green-eyed panic whenever a man tried to charm the wholesome looking one were starting to give Sanzo an ulcer, however quickly and invisibly Kanan mastered them. Besides, Sanzo refused to be so attached as not to dislike it if she was being used as a defense against the Dreaded Male Organ. She wasn't going to be anyone's substitute or second choice.
"Proposal my ass," she said coolly, meeting her favorite pair of wary eyes without apology. "It was an order. Physicians, heal thyselves."
Kanan went into retreating-while-she-dissected-the-implications mode and said lightly, "Is that a real word?"
"Well, the meaning is certainly clear enough, so I suppose it qualifies," Hakkai said thoughtfully, just as easily. Sanzo didn't interfere, since he was clearly going along with the diversion to give Kanan her space.
"And it's part of a proverb. Or a set phrase, at least. Still, in the plural..."
"But I don't think any other of the archaic forms lends itself any better," he pointed out helpfully. "Theeselves? Yeselves? No. And Yerselves lacks something, I think."
"It is a little piratical," Kanan agreed solemnly.
"Thine own selves, perhaps, although the connotations there are--"
"Shut. Up," Sanzo said wearily. It was at times like this that she almost wished she were sleeping with Kaikara instead, who was at least possible to control.
"Well, I really don't understand why you'd make a suggestion like that, Sanzo," Kanan said, in the dangerous voice that had no giggling underneath it at all. "Unless it's a matter of voyeurism, in which case--"
"Screw that," Sanzo said hastily, mostly because she really, really didn't want that sentence finished. "I never said I was going to watch." She paused, and amended, "I never said I was -just- going to watch..."
Hakkai made a stifled sound, turning his head away quickly, but she could see his cheeks rounding, his color rising.
"Sanzo," Kanan exhaled, exasperated. "You can't ask Gonou to let us use him as a toy."
"No. But as a medicine? Watch me."
"I don't need any medicine, Sanzo," she said tersely.
"We're out of here tomorrow," Sanzo shot back, narrow-eyed. "He's staying here. -You- are -leaving- him here. Say goodbye."
That shut her up. Her lips went thin and her eyes crushed wide. Sanzo scowled out across the river, resolving to sacrifice some mouldy piece of insect-riddled fruit to their patron, the goddet of Mercy and Compassion, whose sense of humor bit kappa tail hard. These stupid situations with no good ways out just kept on happening. Being the first one to see them coming didn't usually help any more than it was helping now, either.
"It's just a theory," Hakkai observed, apparently answering Sanzo's assumption that his way of getting them home would actually work.
"Gonou, it's too much."
He turned back to them, his face mild and almost disinterested. She could see it cracking around his eyes. "You can't possibly imagine," he said evenly, pleasant with an undertone of scoff, "that it would be an imposition."
"Too much for me," Kanan explained.
Sanzo met green eyes again. The shape was a little different, but the implacable look behind them, telling her that this was a refusal that he would respect and so would she if she enjoyed breathing with whole ribs, was very familiar.
"Ah," he said, drawing himself to his feet. There was something about the way that man moved, placidly deceptive undercurrents a lulling contrast to his sister's icy waterfalls. He held out his hands to her while Sanzo watched, cursing silently, and held hers in an insufferably graceful benediction for a moment. "Then the woodcutter will withdraw, and leave Chang E to the sunlight. The last thing I want," he added, hushed and rough, bringing her hands up to his lips and kissing her fingers softly, "is to hurt you more."
Her hands clenched on his, and she reached to caress his cheek. "You can't help it," she said tenderly.
"Nor can you," he agreed with a rueful smile. "If I can hurt you less, any way, any way at all, just tell me how. Any way, I'll do it."
"Don't you think it would be more, this way?"
They were leaning towards each other now, two supple irises pulled together by some vagary of wind and gravity. Sanzo had not forgotten to breathe, but her shoulders lowered a notch.
"To be honest," Hakkai sighed, brushing Kanan's long fingers again and wrapping both hands around them as though it were the most natural thing in the world, "I think Sanzo-san is right. This chance... Kanan, every drop of rain is your blood to me. Each flash of lightning, my knife in your hands in your throat. Any other way to say goodbye--Kanan, I'd almost believe in mercy."
"And this way would have the merit of being convincing," Sanzo said dryly. "Convince your body, and it will convince you."
"If you feel the same," Hakkai said. He didn't actually take his eyes off Kanan to flash her the dirty I-can-handle-this-thanks-so-much-for-interrupting look, but she could feel it anyway, and smirked. "But you'd be risking more."
"I think," Kanan said consideringly, and lifted her head an inch to smile wistfully at him, "I think that's a risk I wouldn't mind running."
"Wouldn't you? Kanan, you must have seen, I've changed. Even apart from having been a different Cho Gonou to begin with."
She blinked, then her smile widened. "Well, yes, that was a little obvious," she murmured. "Still, unless he's given you some dreadful disease...?"
Now it was his turn to blink, and his brow furrowed as he rocked back a little on his heels. "I beg your pardon?"
"No? Well, in that case, yes. It is a risk this week, but I don't mind at all."
Sanzo groaned very loudly inside her head. Satori was considerably less annoying than certain other people in their party, but Sanzo hadn't really taken into account the possibility that Kanan would want to give her a little sibling. Still, it made sense, in a twisted kind of way, and since childcare had never been a problem before (and would probably be less, if they could use babysitting the kid to keep Satori out of trouble), she couldn't really have a problem with it if Kanan wanted a pregnancy without resentment. No one could possibly resent Satori, who had surprised them all so far by not getting the crap spoiled out of her, but things had been different before she'd been born.
"The change doesn't bother you?"
"Why would it?" Kanan smiled up at him warmly, and turned the smile on Sanzo, who was glad she was sitting down because melting visibly was fucking embarrassing. "I've changed since then myself."
Hakkai blinked again and frowned a little, as though he'd suddenly found himself in the middle of a new and different conversation. But then Kanan was pulling him down, and when their lips came together he seemed to forget whatever had disturbed him.
Eying them, Sanzo leaned back on her elbows and got comfortable. Maybe just watching hadn't been such a bad idea after all.
OMAKE!
The SEME At The End Of This Fic
-starring lovable, placid old HAKKAI
And adorably vague but considerably older TENPOU-
Tenpou: Ah, Hakkai-kun, you're awake. How do you feel?
Hakkai: Inclined never to smile at Gojyo's hangovers again. Tenpou-san, we're getting disturbingly close to the end of the fic.
Tenpou: Indeed we are, Hakkai-kun! Why, there's only that left, and that, and -that...-
Hakkai: Precisely. And there is a -seme- at the end of this fic.
Tenpou: (hormone sparkles) So we have been led to believe.
Hakkai: (very tired) Tenpou-san, I'm begging you. Please, do not go to the next page.
Tenpou: Begging?
Hakkai: (has had no pride in years) Certainly.
Tenpou: ...You know, Hakkai-kun, for someone who claims not to get along with semes, you make a -magnificent- sub.
[end part 12]
Review Responses: chapter 10 and Photosynthesis
DoSet: Heh, I'm glad someone likes Kanan. I'm not crazy about her these last few chapters, myself. But then, she's got a lot on her plate. Also pleased to please with Goku; he's more difficult to write, as he doesn't capture me the way certain others do. Which probably explains the mob of howling admirers--my bias showing, I know. And I'm -very- pleased the implications about the earcuffs are coming through. That's important, in a subplotty kind of way. Anyone who wants to play with Honshin and Jien is of course welcome to do so. n.n
Me-Nuriko: Actually, Goku and Hakkai are probably -worse- off in the smoke department! Regarding the names--yup. That's why this chapter is not the main pairing. Certain people need to get their heads out of their pasts.
incandescens: Yeah. Yaone has many worthy qualities, and yet... (rueful smile)
WildeLamassu: O.O It lasted as long as the second episode???! (grins)
Thanks also to Elf Asato and Hakkai-san, and my apologies in the matter of Hakkai-strangling. There's more hormonal subplot to wade through before we can get back to the main event, I regret. Oh, wait. No, no, I don't. We -like- the hormonal subplot (grins toothily).