12. Is It You?
(Fortune's Fools)
Word Count: 843
Note: Tenses might be off. I'm still obsessing over present tense, and this was supposed to be in past.
Such a lovely color.
Gojyo looked up, and stared at him, returning the good-natured smile he had started to yearn for towards the end of this guy's -- this Cho guy's -- stay with him. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and he found that he could most likely agree with that sentiment, looking at that smile right then.
"You're going to stay with me, right?"
"If you'd have me." Placid, calm, even. That was Cho for him -- even tempered, so...still, like a pond in the middle of a palace garden. He rolled with the punches in the way that Gojyo couldn't have, wouldn't ever be able to. Was that why he liked Cho? Because he saw everything in this man that he couldn't see in himself?
They say that's how you hate someone -- your own qualities reflected in them.
Here, that certainly wasn't the case.
Gojyo grinned roguishly, paid for the peppers, and grabbed the sack roughly when they had been packed for him by the startled merchant. "If you haven't gotten too used to living the finer life, then yeah, you can stay with me," he said, and started up the road, for his small house on the edge of the world. Cho followed him.
"The finer life? Where, in Chang'an, with Sanzo and Goku?" He scoffed. "Hardly." A pause, and they leave the town behind, start into the woods where Gojyo found him. The stain on the road is gone, washed away by seasons of rain and weeks of wind, but Gojyo can still remember the exact spot where he found Cho, this strange, laughing man who can smile with blood leaking down his face. Not one of the better memories with him, he realizes. "This is the finer life, I think."
Gojyo glanced up at him through chopped and cropped red bangs, red like blood, red like a harvest moon, the red that Cho wasn't afraid to explain to him, wasn't afraid to see. Was that why he liked him? This man with only a surname, not even a real name, who now wore a monocle and a prosthetic eye and a smile that he pretended covered up his past?
"Is that really you, or am I drunk? 'Cause last time I checked, my life was the shittiest possible kind," he replied after a minute, trying to sound like himself, like Gojyo, not like a man too caught up with his own ideas of love and like and hate and ignorance. Cho, he figured, embodied all of that, because he couldn't decide which suited him more.
Cho didn't reply, and they passed that spot without speaking of it, pass where there was red, so much red, but now just blends in with everything else. Gojyo thought that perhaps Cho blended in now, too, with respectably-cut hair, not so noticeable eyewear, and clothes that were neither bloodstained nor too big for him. Vaguely, Gojyo wondered that, if he hadn't been paying attention, if Cho hadn't seen him picking out those peppers, would they have just passed one another in a crowd, both of them now too bland to stand out? Short hair on Gojyo, nothing remarkable on Cho; would they have passed one another, just more faces in the crowd, stepping stones on the path of life?
Gojyo opened his unlocked door, motioned for Cho to go in first, and closes it after a second's hesitation as he thought it over. An entire afternoon passed where he brooded on it -- brooded and watched Cho methodically pick up the place, cleaning dishes, sweeping out accumulated dust, piling trash in one box and laundry in another and beer cans and cigarette butts in another, just the way it used to be, towards the end. Towards the end, when Cho could move again without hissing in pain he wanted to disguise; when they played cards long into the night and Gojyo watched him win hand after hand.
The night passed, too, and Gojyo still thought about it as they toasted one another and themselves and everyone else, as he himself went through a pack of cigarettes just talking to this fucked up man, and then a little more while Cho fixed up his old room and moved himself back in. Just like he'd never left.
No, he finally decided, stubbing out the last cigarette on a beer can and sniggering as he thought of the reaction Cho would give him when he found it in the morning. No, they would not have passed one another, because they were two screwed up people in a very normal town, and screwed up people always had a way of finding each other, no matter what the obstacle.
Gojyo crawled into his own bed and thought about how it would have sucked majorly if they had missed each other, because he really hadn't realized how much he'd missed Cho at all, and how complete he felt with him one room away, just like he'd never left.
The redhead hoped he'd never leave.