Author's note: Angst-mongers, rejoice. Yaoi fans, despair. There is no yaoi here, but there's a whole truckload of angst. If you're just reading for the angst, you can stop after this chapter. Obviously, I don't own Saiyuki, but a girl can dream, can't she?
"That means—" Gojyo's voice is tight with exhaustion and nerves.
"Yes!" I don't give him time to finish.
I start condensing chi into a tight point, but quick as thought the silver crescent blade and chain whip past me. Just as well, because the chi I'm drawing out is more than I can afford to lose; my control suddenly isn't there. The chi dissipates with a soft popping sound as the world suddenly tilts crazily and goes black.
I hope Gojyo hit…
I come awake with a gasp, hands sore from being locked around Hakuryuu's steering wheel. From the light hitting my eyes, it can't be more than three hours past dawn. She's parked in the shade of a prosperous-looking inn, and the seat beside me is empty. Sanzo—! The need to make sure Sanzo is okay is the only thought in my head. Panicking, I clumsily climb out of the driver's seat and stumble to the door of the inn, one hand against the wall for support. I feel like I'm moving underwater with no air. I practically fall through the door and keep moving through sheer inertia. There is a figure in pale robes by the counter. I careen off a table to keep myself upright, and manage a few more unsteady steps. The figure turns around.
"Sanzo?"
I reach one hand towards him as I spend the last of my adrenaline energy on calling his name. I can see him take three quick steps towards me as my limbs turn to lead and I start to fall over. His hand shoots out and grabs mine just before I hit.
"Damnit, Hakkai! This is all my fault!"
The world starts to fade out again. Wait, did he just say that out loud?
I come awake suddenly, the memory of a sharp sound snapping me into consciousness without connecting the memories of where I am or how I got here. Okay, no reason to panic, just look around. I sit up and find myself facing a closed door. I am on a palette on the floor. Look to my left – Gojyo lies on a bed, mostly covered in bandages. Look to my right, Goku lies on a second bed, splints and bandages on multiple parts of his body. Both of them are unconscious. There is a very large bowl next to me, a large serving of something brown and semisolid looking small as it covers the bottom. There is a spoon in it, as though someone had gotten interrupted in the middle of emptying it. I pick up the spoon; the handle is still warm, and the food substance on it seems to be cooked barley with lots of honey. Almost reflexively, I eat the remaining mixture as my brain tries to sort itself out.
I remember the mob of divine youkai, and removing the inhibitors on my ear to fight them. My thoughts shy away from the actual memories of having become almost completely youkai, and I am suddenly very glad of the small inhibitor I'd imbedded in my abdomen those months back, just before we'd faced the scorpion youkai. I skip ahead to the next patch of true coherency, crossing back through that hall as we left. I remember Hakuryuu telling me that something was very wrong with Sanzo. Suddenly, everything falls into place. Gojyo and Goku are severely wounded; I'd collapsed right in front of Sanzo. I'm fairly sure he didn't claim responsibility for this mess out loud, and I was in no condition to pick up subtleties from his chi. I suck the spoon thoughtfully. He must have been the one feeding me, but for a thought like that to have been broadcast so clearly . . .
"Hakuryuu?" I call, setting down the empty bowl with the spoon inside it.
Something stirs on Gojyo's bed, and Hakuryuu's tiny head rises from the mass of bandages.
"Was Sanzo in here?" Her head bobs: yes. "Where did he go?"
She moves her head towards the door, then snakes it around to the right and immediately back towards the center of the room and looks at me, her slender neck forming a U-shape.
"The room next to us, on the right?" An affirmative chirp. "Thank you." I smile my gratitude, and she lays her head back down.
I stand up carefully. The honey has mostly restored my chi reserves, the barley is giving me a more solid source of energy, and the time I spent unconscious has gone a long way to restoring my energy system to normal after having become almost completely youkai – further youkai than I'd been before. Sanzo's accusing reassurance just before I had done so, followed by several hours of not being able to think about it, much less brood about it, have left me remarkably grounded. The feelings of guilt and worthlessness that had hounded me for over three years as I struggled with the fallout of Kanan's abduction . . . they are still there, but quiet, no longer something to wrestle with. Sinner, abomination . . . I am what I am, and nothing will change that. I can accept my worthless nature completely, without wishing to be what I had once been. Gonou has finally been laid to rest, and for the first time in my new life I feel whole and balanced. There is no time to revel in my newfound peace; I have a debt to repay to Sanzo, and quickly.
A few quick steps to the door, shut it gently behind me, and open the door to Sanzo's room. What I see does not surprise me, not after what's happened. Sanzo is sitting on the room's single bed, leaning against the wall with his knees drawn up to his chest. The Maten Scripture has been laid neatly atop his robe on a nearby chair, and his right arm trembles slightly as it holds his gun firmly to his temple. He gives me a look of hopelessness and utter despair as I close the door behind me, and it looks like he's been crying.
"You're breaking your promise, Sanzo," I point out mildly as I move towards him.
"Then I release you from yours." Sanzo's voice is shaky and his eyes beg me to stop, turn around, and walk away.
There is a gentle, apologetic smile on my face, but I doubt Sanzo is aware enough to interpret it. When I reach the bed, I calmly reach out and grasp Sanzo's right hand in my left, pulling it and the gun away from his head. Skin-to-skin contact; his panic slams into me. He has been pushed almost to the breaking point, his chi a writhing mat of sick yellow and dirty white on the background of his usual blue. Through our mingled chi, I send him some calming energy and watch as the yellow and white are absorbed by the blue. Wait . . . absorbed? A jolt of alarm flashes quickly through me as I come to a horrible realization. Sanzo does not allow himself to express or vent his fear and guilt; he has been bottling everything up for . . . how long? How long has it been that he has borne the name of his predecessor? I have tried for three years to observe Right Action with Sanzo, not causing him harm through action or inaction. But I am also a healer, and I understand that sometimes in order to heal, one must first do something that hurts. Sanzo, forgive me for what I am about to do . . .
Some of the panic leaves Sanzo's eyes and rationality returns to his thoughts. My grip on his hand – and the gun – is gentle but unbreakable as I bring my hand back to my chest. His eyes widen and he starts trembling as he realizes that the gun is now pointed at my own heart. Well, just to the side, but he doesn't know that. He struggles, trying to free his hand from my grip or at least let go of the gun. When this fails, he looks up at me and my eyes hold his captive.
"Hakkai . . . don't . . . I won't . . ." The panic jumps back into his eyes, but to his horror he is still painfully rational. His words are almost sobs, pleading while denying the reality of the situation.
"This is what you would be doing to me." My words bore relentlessly into Sanzo.
I am being cruel, but this has to be done. Sanzo tries to look away, but I'm not letting him. I smile apologetically, and this time he is able to see the apology through his rising panic. My thumb shifts to press his finger against the trigger, and his conscious mind shrieks in fear and denial for an instant before my grip tightens.
The sound of the gunshot paralyzes Sanso, and threatens to shatter him.
Hot pain sears my chest. I drop to my knees, releasing Sanzo's hand as I bring both of mine up to my bleeding chest and begin to heal the wound. There is a sharp motion in my peripheral vision, and the gun clatters somewhere behind me. I am vaguely aware of Sanzo hovering over me uncertainly; all my attention is focused on repairing the damage to my internal organs and continuing to breathe in short, sharp gasps. When the wound is entirely healed I rest a moment, sucking in deep lungfuls of air. I compose myself and look up at Sanzo; his face is a broken mask of anger with anguish beneath it.
"Damnit, Hakkai!" He's trying to sound furious and failing; his tone is one of pleading and heartbreaking vulnerability. "Why did you do that? Why did you shoot . . ." He breaks off and looks away, struggling for composure.
"To prevent you from shooting yourself," I reply calmly, brushing bits of dried blood off of my hands.
" . . . Why . . . ?" The word is barely a gasp between choked-back sobs.
I reach up and brush my fingers against the back of Sanzo's hand, forcing him to look into my eyes and then pulling him forcibly out of his nervous breakdown.
"Sanzo, I would gladly suffer any hurt, if it means that you would be spared it."
He flinches away from me at the reminder of my time at the temple, and at the realization that I mean that literally. His mouth opens, but he hasn't formed a coherent protest, so I cut him off before he starts babbling.
"You made me live," I say simply, with no attempt to control my voice. The words are a calm statement of fact, with no accusation. "This is how I chose to live my life. Would you rather I . . . didn't?" The tone insinuates that if Sanzo is unhappy with my choice, the alternative is for me to break my promise to him. I've left him no choice but to accept that I am going to keep putting myself between him and things that would cause him to suffer.
He sighs, face twisted into a sour grimace. ". . . never meant for anyone to get hurt on my account." It's not got enough force to be a challenge, and comes out more like something he's trying to convince himself of.
With the masks and facades out of the way, I am able to pick out Sanzo's logic with disturbing ease. He and I really are too much alike; while I have been trying to spare him any pain, he has been trying to do the same, taking all the world's hurts upon himself out of a deep responsibility to his position and the man who'd held it before him.
"Life is suffering." My words hammer at him gently, relentlessly forcing him to realize their truth. "We suffer because we desire things." His expression takes on that disdainful cast that any prolonged discussion of Buddhism brings about. "I was already hurt when you found me. There was no way for you to take that hurt away from me, but you gave me a reason to not want to die." It hurts slightly, saying that aloud. Aches like a scar, and that slight pain makes the tone urgent. I am willing Sanzo to accept my words in the core of his very being. "You gave me something to desire, something I felt was worth the pain it brought."
He flinches again, and I can almost see his silent self-accusation at having brought more pain into my life. I raise my eyebrows and regard him with a chiding look.
"I did try to make you aware of the fact that if you abused yourself, I was more than willing to match you abuse for abuse until you stopped."
The cringe tells me that Sanzo knew this, but had been trying to deny it. The guilt at letting me hurt myself had indeed gotten him to stop, but he'd never consciously connected it directly to his own actions. Or perhaps he did, but he hadn't known that I'd done it deliberately.
"It's called negative reinforcement," I continue in an artificially casual tone. "The premise that if you do something bad, something else bad will happen. It's supposed to teach you that negative actions will only result in further negativity, and thus encourage you to not do bad things." The flat look on Sanzo's face brings an embarrassed smile to mine. "Ah, it didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped. But it did stop individual events from dragging on," I continue semi-apologetically, "and nothing else really worked for that."
A streak of the irritation he felt all the times I forced him to take better care of himself shoots through his chi. As with Goku, Sanzo's raw nerves have occasionally caused him to wish that he hadn't saved us from our lonely fates.
"'No good deed goes unpunished.' I believe that saying fits here," I say lightly in response to that unspoken thought.
He snorts and looks away.
"Sanzo." I call his attention back, force him to look at me. "Did you honestly expect me to not worry for you, after seeing how much you worried for me?"
" . . . not honestly," Sanzo admits grudgingly. "But . . ."
"But you also never honestly admitted to yourself that you did worry for me?" I am not really asking, more forcing him to admit to it now.
He looks away again, uncomfortable.
". . . not for a long tone," he mutters reluctantly, realizing that I'm not going to let this go. "And . . . if you were going to worry for me . . . I would've preferred you not hurting yourself in the process." He manages to scrape a weak glare together, accusing me of making him worry with my little bouts of self-abuse.
"It was the only way I had to stop you from hurting yourself," I retort calmly, unashamed. "You have no one to blame but yourself, you know." He looks down at me suspiciously. "If you'd let me continue to think you despised my very existence, I never would have devoted myself to trying to keep you in one piece."
Sanzo gives me a haunted look. If he'd done that, I would have kept hurting myself, getting worse and worse until I'd died. And I know now that with as hard as he worked to keep me alive, my death would have shattered him. It occurs to me to wonder how close I came to dying today; I know that the fear of my death is an old one, and shouldn't be affecting him this strongly. Ruthlessly, I push the guilt of that possibility aside. Browbeating myself over that now won't do Sanzo any good. I've made my point; time now to drive it home in such a way that he can't deny it to himself ever again.
"Then by forcing me to live, you were in fact crying out for a reason to live, yourself." He gives me a startled look, but I can't tell whether he's surprised that I've figured this out, or just that I'm saying it out loud. "I'm not going to let you hide from this or pretend it didn't happen, because the more you evade that admission, the more you're going to end up hurting yourself." A pause to let that sink in; Sanzo's eyes have a vaguely glazed look to them. I touch his hand gently, and his eyes focus on me again. "And I believe I've made it quite clear that your pain is my pain."
The dirty white of guilt completely overwhelms his chi; between that and having his defenses stripped away, there is nothing he can find to say. He looks at me pleadingly, begging me to drop it and let him try to get his denial back into place.
"You don't have to say anything to me," I tell him softly. "I just want you to know that I WILL know if you start brooding about this." A tiny prod with my chi, and he understands my meaning. "And when you do, I'll be right there to look into your eyes and force you to remember this."
I stand up and walk across the small room. Sanzo's chi relaxes a bit at the motion, then alarm shoots through it as he realizes that I'm not leaving. I can feel his panic beat against me as I kneel and retrieve the gun, then return to where he sits trembling on the bed. His gaze is riveted on the gun as though it were a poisonous snake, and he does not see my hand reaching for his. His head jerks back to look at me as I grab his right hand, but he does not resist as I wrap his limp fingers around the gun and guide his hand until the barrel is pressed firmly to my left temple, his finger held unresisting against the trigger. Sanzo is attempting to withdraw inside his own body.
"I want you to look at me very carefully." My chi doesn't give him a choice; I am burning this image into his mind with the magnitude of the situation. "This is my life you hold in your hands." Through our mingled chi, I convey to him that the gun to my head is metaphoric of the relationship that has grown between us from the first bloody seed planted more than three years ago. "If you pull that trigger, I will die." I am spelling things out as though to a small child, but right now, that's all Sanzo is capable of understanding, even with my chi underlining every word. "Now listen to me. Your life is my life. If you put this gun to your head again, I want you to remember this and know that you would be putting it to my head, as well. Do you understand?"
Sanzo looks between my serious eyes and the gun against my head with a sick expression, then with an effort, focuses on my face and nods once, helplessly. I release his hand and place the gun on the chair where the Maten scripture has been folded neatly, then sit on the bed beside Sanzo. He has his face buried in his hands, and his breathing is shallow and irregular. I place my hand on his bare shoulder, soothing his chi with my calm reassurance.
"I don't hate you, either for what happened or for what you just tried to do." My voice is warm and comforting, and that seems to be dissolving the last remnants of the walls he's been using to hold all the pain inside for almost a decade. "And if you ever kill yourself," I continue in that same soothing voice, "I will forgive you. But I will also follow you to Hell, and make you see what I've done to myself because you weren't there to stop me."
There, now he knows that if he wants me to live, all he has to do is live himself. I've given him the reason he's been searching for so desperately since his mentor died. I've seen into the darkest portions of his soul and not turned away; I've promised him my forgiveness even if he breaks his promise to me. Deliberately, gently, I pull down the last fragile barrier between himself and his past.
I can feel him regressing as all the old pain floods his heart. Behind his hands, he starts weeping, and he unconsciously turns to me for comfort. I hold him as though he were a small child, radiating love and forgiveness as he cries all the tears he has not let himself shed in many years. When he has cried himself out and is trembling on the edge of unconsciousness from emotional exhaustion, I gently tuck him into bed. He falls asleep immediately, looking more vulnerable than I've ever seen him. After a moment, I quietly leave the room and shut the door behind me.