This marks a rare occasion - this chapter ends in about the same place in "time/events" as Here Lies Gonou. Isil's comment was, "...it'll never happen again, you realize."
A tab key, and access to more than three of the punctuation marks on the keyboard, that's all I ask...I know the older builds of this program had them, and put them BACK once after much griping, so why the fuck did they remove them again?
I wake up to someone banging on my door; the stars are still out, the moon's set, and there's no sign of sunlight yet, so it's somewhere around three. Fucking. AM.
"Honored Sanzo?" It's not Goku, it's one of the monks; I shouldn't shoot at the door to make them go away, but it's tempting anyway. He bangs on the door again, and I drag myself sitting up, trying to will a horrible death through the closed door. "Most Honored Sanzo...?"
He starts knocking again while I'm crossing the room. "Give me a minute!"
"There's something you need to attend to, most honored Sanzo." , he whines; Patience, they preach - patience my ass.
I crack the door, leaning on it; his impatient fretting flags when he sees the snarl he's getting. "Whatever it is, it can wait until morning." I start to shut the door; he catches it, wincing as it closes on his hand.
"Please, Honored Sanzo, this needs to be dealt with!" He's determined to not go away short of me shooting him, and he's not worth waking up a healer this late for.
"If it's that important, it can wait until I'm dressed!" I glare at him until he pulls his hand out of the door to wait. I could decide that "when I'm dressed" means "when I get up in the morning and get dressed", and just go back to bed, but he'd probably just keep banging at my door until I humor him. I pull on my outer robe, put my gun in the holster hidden in the sleeve, and take the time to make sure the sutra's draped neatly over my shoulders, the monk at the door getting more irritated with every second I take.
His resolve on getting my attention staggers again when I storm out and pull my door shut, but he doesn't budge beyond a nervous swallow.
"Well? What is it?"
"Your acolyte. This way - the Great Hall." He starts walking like it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to follow him, with no intention of answering me until he's shown me whatever he's upset about; if "my acolyte" is actually starting trouble, he's toast, but if this is just some over-reacting twitch, I'm going to take the monk's head off. He moves briskly down the stairs to the Great Hall, where the candles are lit, and "my acolyte" is kneeling on one of the cushions in complete silence in front of the Buddha statue.
"You see, Honored Genjo Sanzo? There he is!" The monk's dead meat.
"I see him. What about it?"
"He is...he is..." The monk - younger than me - is speaking as if he's doing something too horrible to contemplate.
"I am meditating on the lives that ended because of my actions. Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing?" He didn't even move to look away from the candles and the statue, his voice quiet, worn out, sardonic. The monk just points as if somehow, it should all be clear to me how awful this is, giving me an expectant look.
"Well? Doesn't look like there's a problem. What'd you wake me up for?" And pick your reasons well if you like breathing.
"But Genjo Sanzo...perhaps he should find some other place to meditate?" I should've remembered, any reminder that anything outside their nice narrow little bubble exists is far too much of an offense to their delicate sensibilities.
"Why, what's wrong with here? This is where everyone else comes to meditate, isn't it?" You're the one that called him an acolyte, you're barely out of an acolyte's robes, what the Hell is wrong with you?
"But it's disgraceful!", he blurts, as if he can't wrap his head around why I don't see this as some terrible transgression.
"What's disgraceful about it?" One more 'but this should be self-evident' answer and he's getting a fan upside the head, and should count himself lucky it's not a gunshot.
"It's unseemly that such violent thoughts should be brought into the Buddha's presence!" Violent. Thoughts. He's upset about violent thoughts so he -woke ME up at 3 fucking am-! Who does he think he's talking to? I open my mouth, to excuse both myself and my ward - if he doesn't want violent thoughts in the temple, I'll just remove myself -
"My apologies. I will remove my unworthy thoughts from the Buddha's presence." He barely succeeds at keeping it flat, just enough to make it hard to tell if he's sarcastic or serious, annoyed or apologetic. He stands up from the cushion, does a small, stiff formal bow, and walks out.
The candles flicker in silence with both of us staring off the way he just went, then the monk looks to me for some clarification of what just happened. I keep my entire response to straightening over him and glowering at him until he shrinks down and slinks out, glancing back to me for some answer on what he just did wrong.
If this is how things are going to go, I'm going to be nuts before the month is out.
I spend a good twenty minutes, half an hour maybe, first staring at the ceiling, then out at the cloudless night sky. Sleep's not coming, as much as I'd like to get back to it; I get up, get dressed again, and leave my room, listening to the too-quiet of the temple at night and looking for where this newest nameless, faceless gnawing is coming from.
I find myself in the great hall almost before I've realized I'm there; it's empty now, the candles've all been put out, washing everything to shades of grey and shadow. For all the fuss that monk made, nothing's come of it but an empty hall; the building creaks and settles with the sound of a breeze, and if I were to tell someone who'd never seen it in daylight that it was haunted and long-abandoned, I don't think they'd argue. The wind whistles around it as if it were deserted, and the sheer emptiness of it starts gnawing, threatening to bring up a few other entries in my list of old bad memories; I walk outside before it gets the chance, to the equally empty courtyard, the night breeze off the ocean chilled. There's a few lights still burning in the city, as always; the night-shift gate guard gives enough acknowledgement for propriety as I head out, practically one of the statues himself.
Once I'm down the temple steps, I light a cigarette, and just let rote guide me on a practiced path through this area of the city; the shops are closed, the bars even've been closed for a while, the gaslight streetlamps are only sporadically on, there's voices here and there but no-one on the road visibly. My own footsteps on the cobblestone are enough to obscure anything overheard to where it can't be understood. All I need to do is pin down what's eating at the back of my mind; watch the paving stones go by until something comes forward.
I wouldn't even be awake now if not for that stupid monk getting a burr up his ass and deciding that piety was more important than patience. Koumyou used to find it oddly amusing that two of the more important symbols in Buddhism were a jewel and a lotus, yet it was often left to footnote in the temple that jewels had to be dug out of the dirt and lotuses grew from swamp muck. The joke, he said, was that in striving for purity, everyone tries to find the flower by killing the roots. I wonder if the monk caught that the only one in that room that wasn't being openly hostile, was the one he was so upset about finding meditating in the great hall.
Meditating on his sins...like it'll accomplish anything like this. Nothing will change what happened; certainly not kneeling in front of a statue dredging the past like fishing bloated corpses out of a lake. If the dark spiral I touched that first time I checked on him in the cell was any indication, he doesn't need any help turning inward on himself; it was like sticking my hand into one of the old hell-paintings of the centipede devouring itself, but I'm short on options to distract that with how the judgement ended up.
I was too tired, too cranky, too habitually closed-off to've picked anything up when he decided to leave the great hall; too tired and dumbfounded at his cutting me off to've stopped him. He went from the sarcasm and derision of earlier to ...was that seeking a compromise, annoyance at our argument, or self-reproach? I wasn't watching, and I'm not sure watching would've told me much even if I had been paying attention. It wasn't what I had expected to happen...but then, how much do I really have to build an idea on?
Can't walk on the rapids when the river thaws.
I come to a square with a fountain, four dragons rising from the center spouting water; sit on the edge absently, ignoring the occasional fleck of water from the center spray. I have no clue, really, what I'm dealing with, beyond some sketchy observations. Most of the time I've known him so far, has been while he was too wounded and disoriented to even really be aware of his surroundings. Even the aura-bits I read while he was out of it are likely affected by the injuries; I can't rely on that now that he's intact. Scratch out everything from his suicide attempt in the ruins to when he arrived at the doctor's until I have more to build on to look at it from; it won't help me. What else do I have? Before the ruins, there's what I saw of his actions, and what Gojyo said; the former's still sketchy and more seeing winter-ice than water beneath, the latter's suspect because I know Gojyo omitted quite a bit in mistrust. After he came out of the doctors - a sarcastic jab my direction, and a lot of bewildered following me around absorbing information, then the little display in the Great Hall. Not enough to get a clear picture, or do more than confuse myself with speculation until I have something more to add to the picture.
Cho Gonou may be dead and in many ways a new creature, but who and what ever walks out of this temple at the end of this, will have come from those roots. It's almost dead certain that I'm not going to get a clear picture of what I'm dealing with now until I have some idea of who he was, then enough time to get a more solid idea of his reactions now.
I start walking back, the streets still empty. I don't know what I'm getting into, but I'm eyeball deep in it, and the rest of the temple won't be any help; something familiar's creeping up -
Responsibility. Not just short-term, dealing with a specific job or event and moving on; I've set myself up as being responsible for him, and while there's technically a timetable to it, he has nothing to go back to really, and I'm not going to carelessly ditch him to that when this is over. It may not be on the magnitude of what I took on when I brought Goku off the mountain, but I've still made myself personally, legally, and officially responsible for him and what becomes of him, and I'm not sure I have the slightest clue what I'm doing.
I barely remember to get rid of the burned-down remains of my cigarette before I reach the gate, the sky lightening behind me; the guard lets me in without any comment. Putting names to the nervous frets hasn't quelled them entirely; instead of heading for my room, I cut through the Great Hall, and check the smaller meditation halls in the acolyte's wing. A few of the normal acolytes are either up early or having their own bouts of insomnia; I get a few glances in passing, but there's no sign of my ward. I check his cell, in case he went to bed; there's no sign of him there either. The kitchen's empty, so he isn't taking time to eat; I start making the rounds of the gardens, since people will often head to them in better weather. I start worrying as I continue to find nothing. I didn't leave that long, the gate guard would've stopped him if he'd tried to leave by himself and didn't seem to've had anything happen, so he shouldn't have left, unless he found some way out that isn't watched - entirely possible. If he got out of the temple, with local politics...He's got nowhere to go, I hope he wouldn't be that stupid.
Another circle of the courtyards and gardens, people are starting to move around and the sun's rising, I'm not hearing any word of him from anyone wandering around or seeing him in passing either. I end up stopped under my own window, in the north courtyard, in front of the lotus pond with the one gnarled water-tree in full bloom. I lean back on the wall, rubbing the bridge of my nose, the air seeming three times thicker. There's got to be some way to figure out where he is, to tell if something happened, and it strikes me how much could've happened - I'm dealing with someone with demonstrated suicidal tendencies that a good chunk of this area wants dead. If someone hasn't seen him, then he must've gone somewhere out of sight, if he's not in the temple then he either slipped past the front gate guard, or found a way out that wasn't guarded; I'm not aware of any, but this's a large and old enough building that there's probably some we don't know about. If he is here, then he's somewhere that someone wouldn't have seen him, like an unused room, or some little niche in the gardens; that leaves…a horribly huge amount of ground to cover, without much in the way of clues to go on.
When I start checking attic-rooms and lesser-used places in the north wing, I end up passing Goku on his way to wake me up for breakfast. The first "Sanzo?" almost doesn't register as I'm checking doors; most of the rooms around mine aren't used unless there's someone important visiting, and he just watches me quizzically while I'm systematically opening doors. "Sanzo? Did you lose something?"
I turn to him. "Where's -", and lapse into a few empty gestures for lack of any name to use; he gets it anyway, and shrugs.
"Haven't seen him - shouldn't he be in his room or something like that?"
"Not there, some moron was hassling him last night." I start checking doors again.
"Ehh...so you think he's hiding somewhere?" He brushes his hair back uncertainly. "Geez, there's tons of places to hide around here that nobody ever bothers with."
My reply's a curt "Hrph." and a shoulder-hunch.
"Sooo should I get breakfast for you and leave it in your room or something?"
"Don't bother; I'll get something when I've found him."
I can feel the bewildered, almost-frustrated look - the 'gauging whether or not I need pestering to remember to eat' look, then he just wishes me luck and runs off toward the kitchens.
The morning wears on to a lot of quizzical looks and empty rooms until I've covered not only the entire main temple complex, but the annex buildings as well; he's not indoors, unless he's gone somewhere behind me, and more than one priest gets stopped with a "Where's -?" or "Have you seen -?" long enough for me to get an "I don't know, Honored Sanzo" or a "No, Honored Sanzo" or a shrug and a look like I've lost my mind - so wherever he is, he probably hasn't passed through anywhere he'd be visible.
The gardens are designed to encourage quiet solitude; normally I'd be grateful for the way it's organized into hundreds of nooks, crannys, small vales, and hidden sitting-spots that all tend to shift over time depending on individual plants and the groundskeeper's whims, now it's just frustrating, and makes checking the main gardens take forever. I end up running into Goku again, on one of his usual routines of exploring the gardens; after my growl and glower at "...still haven't found him?", he volunteers to let me know if he finds anything, and peels off a different direction.
There's no sign of him in any of the larger gardens, which leaves some of the smaller courtyards and lesser gardens in niches around annexes, smaller shrines, and between buildings or in corners - the ones that you practically have to stumble across to know about, and if he's in one of those, then I don't need a panic attack. I head off blowing past before anyone can even attempt to get my attention if they're not bringing up where he is, ticking over what I know of the place to find every one of the little nook and cranny gardens that I can. Half of them are overgrown and near-forgotten, beyond the scope of the groundkeeper and his assistants to keep up with more than sporadically.
I finally find him curled up asleep in a thorn-overgrown garden in a cul-de-sac of some of the back halls, the sun close to straight overhead; there's a small, run down shrine being slowly swallowed by the vines, escapees from a trellis in another garden; the things carpet whatever they cover in white flowers for a while in spring, and otherwise are mostly just fast-growing clinging carpets of jagged sharp edges. He's asleep in front of the shrine, sitting up with the special slump from nodding off kneeling in meditation that usually gets younger acolytes in trouble; it's more than likely that he's been out here pretty much since he left the main hall.
I nudge his shoulder; he wakes with a start, twisting around to blink at me in surprise.
"So this is where you've been."
He settles back to facing the shrine. "Its run-down imperfection is more suitable for a detestable sinner like me." It's the same flat voice as last night, but whether the self-deprecating warp was there so strongly last night or not I'm not sure.
"You didn't have to leave the main temple, you know." I shift my gaze to the side, to the ground-runners of the thorns.
"I dodn't want my actions to reflect badly upon you." Reflect badly? Him? "I'm supposed to be showing you the proper respect. After all, you're responsible for my actions." There's that sardonic, derisive lilt again.
With my reputation - if he knew that my usual reaction to running across an acolyte falling asleep like this, is a gunshot straight up right behind them..."You're hardly going to affect my reputation." I've been around this temple enough that I know my reputation's a joke; I'm tolerated because I can't be removed from my position.
He laughs bitterly, quietly. "I'm a sinner and an abomination. You're the holy Genjo Sanzo. How am I not going to be a stain on your reputation?" The dark twist is directed more inward, though it's hard to tell through the thick, erosive tone. I'm still in the "holy" category somehow - I think I'd prefer that spiral aimed at me, at least then I'd have some sense that he still had some will to keep living without me standing over him.
"Feh. About as holy as..." The dark mutter's directed more at myself than a part of the conversation.
He picks up quickly, the bleak tone of voice gaining sharp edges, dark cloud putting claws outward - "Not that you should care whether your fellow monks like me or not; I'm just alive so that I can suffer, right?" He turns suddenly with a cold, vengeful glare, all the sharp bits in his aura suddenly pointed my way in accusation. "Isn't that why you spared my life?" The spiral's all mine for the moment, but...hatred for wanting him to live... Undercuts everything, deeper than I'd expected, dragging back to the fear that what I'm asking of him is no more than petty selfishness turned to cruelty, and I don't have any answers for that trapped outrage; a weak "No..." scrapes out my throat.
A moment of confusion trips up the sharp edges; he lowers his voice. "There's no other reason for me to be alive."
Why did I save him, argue so vehemently to keep him alive? "I couldn't leave you like that."
"It's what I wanted." It's too quick to be a simple statement, too almost-flinching and weakened to be a snap; a weak echo of frustrated despair and a plea for explanation.
I don't really have anything I can say, to give him a reason to live besides my stubborn sense of responsibility.
The black spiral settles back around him even though that look, that haunted plea, doesn't shift; then the noon bell starts tolling, breaking up the silence.
