The next twenty-four hours passed rather uneventfully, with Hakkai pretending to sleep much of the time. Sanzo and Goku came and went a few times, just checking up on him briefly before returning to whatever occupations they had in the other rooms. Gojyo spent a lot of time in Hakkai's room, watching him closely with a wary eye. Hakkai found himself resenting the observation.
He lay still and silent most of the time, stretched out on his stomach, or curled on his side, eyes closed in a pretense of sleep that he just couldn't make a reality. His mind was continually returning to the terrible event three weeks past. The gunshot rang out in his head over and over again. He could swear sometimes that he could feel the girl's hot, sticky blood covering his hands, soaking into his skin. The worst was when he remembered how it had sprayed against his face when the bullet entered her head.
Hakkai remembered the cold, cold anger that had gripped his belly when he learned of the husband's suicide. The man was a fucking coward, they all were. That girl had not been the first in that place to be spirited away, for the purpose of fulfilling some depraved monster's lust. They had not saved any of them. They hadn't even tried. Her own husband had left her to that fate. If he was going to die, he should have died trying to save her, damn it!
The girl had wanted to die in the cave; she knew that she carried the seed of her captor within her, and she knew that the man she had married would never be able to accept what had happened to her. Hakkai had refused to listen, stubbornly believing that there was a chance that this man would be like him.
He loved Kanan, would have stayed with her until the end of time, but he was not insensible of their situation. Hakkai and Kanan were siblings. They could never have children. He had known, the moment she told him about the child growing in her belly, that he could have accepted it. He could have loved both her and the taboo product of her violation. That poor girl in the village had known that her mate was not that strong.
He knew that she wasn't Kanan, hadn't resembled Kanan, his beloved sister and lover whom he'd been unable to save,; he couldn't bring her back by saving that poor wretch, but his soul was twisted every time he thought about it. The comparison was inevitable. Hakkai had wanted to save that girl, keep her alive as a testament and an apology to the woman he loved.
Instead, he had killed the girl, whose name had never learned, with Sanzo's gun.
Hakkai's head hurt from thinking about it, from trying to keep the tears at bay. The Three Aspects had killed Cho Gonou, but cruelly kept his heart alive and beating, having to live from day to day with the memory of his failure. Now the sins of his past folded in on themselves, repeated endlessly like reflections in a hall of mirrors. Everywhere he turned, they were there, perpetually laying in wait for him to forget for a moment. Then they pounced on him, blindsiding him and tearing his soul open afresh.
Why hadn't they let him die? Fucking Buddhists and their respect for life. Where the hell had they been when his whole world had fallen apart? Why hadn't they been there to stop her from cutting her own flesh open? Where was their respect for her life, for his?
Now they had sent him on this journey to save the world, as if he really gave a shit about that. Piercing anger gripped his heart painfully as he silently denounced all gods who ever had been, or ever would be. How many times would they expect him to live through the same thing?
There was a stronger and more terrible anger even than this, within his heart. He had managed to keep from looking at it too closely over the years, but it bubbled to the surface now. It was the one thing he had never confessed to anyone, the secret that threatened to swallow him whole.
He hated Kanan for what she had done.
It was this truth that had nearly driven him mad, then and now. He refused to acknowledge it most of the time, had, in fact, almost managed to convince himself that it wasn't true. Almost, but not quite. His guilt did not lie in her death or in his failure, though those things caused him nearly unbearable grief. His guilt was in his anger at her for leaving him, for taking his life and future away with her. For forcing him to watch her do it. For her lack of faith in his love. For making his sacrifice worthless with her death. For turning him into what she hated and feared.
What he hated and feared.