18. Tears

(Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Word Count: 1,868

For Dani.

If they had learned one thing from Sanzo, it was not to be emotional. It was to get up when you were knocked down, to flip off the person who did it, shoot them, and then keep walking. It was muichimotsu, hold nothing, and it was loving yourself and a select few other people. Sanzo tolerated weakness because he was human and because the youkai he traveled with had suspiciously human qualities, but tolerance did not automatically include indulgence.

And thus it went for three years.

--

When the journey was over, when everything they had set out to accomplish had been done, they returned home, feeling slightly empty, fairly bewildered. It was over. They had to go back to leading normal lives; or, at any rate, as normal as they had ever lead. Sanzo adapted easily, heading back to Chang'an with Goku in tow, and even Hakkai and Gojyo managed to not seem as detached as they really felt.

"You want to stay with me?" the redhead asked gruffly after some hard drinking at an inn.

"Alright," Hakkai replied pleasantly, unaffected. Gojyo had stopped him somewhere between seven and ten, concerned that the Real Hakkai would come out if the brunette pursued drinking himself into oblivion, but the kappa had kept going. After all, he didn't go into intense depression if he got wasted.

The two of them somehow made it back to Gojyo's little house, abandoned, not infested with bugs or animals or people -- exactly as they had left it. It was dusty inside, and the food they had thoughtlessly forgotten to toss out was either moldy, spoiled, or brown, but after a brief cleaning out by Hakkai, it looked much the same as it had before. Jeep settled onto a chair, Gojyo collapsed on his bed, and Hakkai followed shortly after, although he wound up sleeping in a chair across from the bed.

Gojyo questioned this when he woke up the next morning, his headache pounding but his expertise pushing it to the back of his mind.

"You were taking up the entire bed," Hakkai replied logically as he restocked and organized the kitchen. His early-morning shopping trips were still a habit from back in the days before Gojyo and Goku would be loaded up with the chores.

"Coulda pushed me over," Gojyo muttered, rubbing his eyes with one hand and scratching at his stubbly chin with the other.

"Easier to wake the dead," his roommate cheerfully replied.

Hakkai had a permanently happy demeanor, but sometimes, on very rare occasions, Gojyo thought that he could see through it, like it was makeup or that Hakkai was losing his touch. For a few minutes, as he silently watched Hakkai organize the jars of sauces and condiments alphabetically, the redhead thought that he could see the Real Hakkai underneath.

--

Weeks passed this way, and Gojyo picked up his gambling again, sometimes dragging Hakkai along with him. The brunette's luck was astounding, and he won even more times than Gojyo did, eliciting some small amount of popularity with the local bar floozies. They were different, younger, but equally as air headed, equally as alike. They had different faces, but they were really just the same. The living they made off of the cards was fair -- well enough to support them, at least -- but Hakkai mentioned off-handedly one night that he would like to teach.

"That's what you did before, right?" Gojyo hazarded, not really recalling many details from 'before'. He climbed into the bed and swept the blanket aside for Hakkai, who slipped in neatly beside him.

"Yes," he said mildly, pulling the dark blue blanket up over the two of them. "I taught, and Kanan stayed at home..." He trailed off, his eyes looking blankly at the ceiling. Gojyo let it go for a few minutes, and then decided that Hakkai would want an answer, since obviously he was not going to drop it. Hakkai didn't ask for much -- he was an easy-going person -- but when he wanted something, he wanted it.

"There's a school in the next town over," Gojyo finally said.

"I'll go out in the morning and see if they're short-staffed."

Hakkai rolled over, his back to Gojyo, and curled up in preparation for sleep. The redhead ran a hand through his hair and sighed discontentedly.

--

Hakkai cooked for them every night except Friday, which was the night Gojyo completely dedicated himself to cards. He wouldn't come home until the early hours of the morning, and even though sometimes he suspected Hakkai to be still awake, most times he wasn't. He'd be in the spare room, or at the kitchen table, or at the small, cheap desk they'd set up by the front door. He didn't sleep in the bed when Gojyo wasn't there. More than once since he'd taken the teaching job Gojyo had had to drag him from the desk or the table to the bed, disturbing piles of paperwork and then earning his anger in the morning. On Fridays, Gojyo wound up with only a belly full of beer and nothing else, so on Saturday mornings Hakkai cooked extra for breakfast.

"Don't sleep at the desk," Gojyo said suddenly after he had spent several minutes staring at his plate rather than eating. His voice was gruff. Hakkai glanced up at him, then back down at the paper, and shoved another forkful of food in his mouth.

"I can't help it," he said smoothly, and instantly Gojyo knew he was lying. "I start to grade papers, and the minute I open my pen, I fall asleep. By the end of the week I'm just so tired." He shrugged and used his fork to scrape the rest of his food onto the edge of the plate for easier access.

"You can help it," the redhead countered loudly, and Hakkai stopped what he was doing, bringing his eyes from the paper to meet Gojyo's crimson ones. "I don't know why you do it, but for whatever kind of shit reason, you do it on purpose."

Calmly, Hakkai folded up the paper and then adjusted his glasses. "I don't understand what you mean." He stood up slowly and gathered his almost-empty plate and silverware before heading to the sink.

"You've changed, Hakkai," Gojyo said desperately, but the clinking of shifting china and metal was uninterrupted. "Ever since we've got back, you're not the same."

"You're still drunk." His voice was emotionless, and it gave away nothing. In a fit of rage, Gojyo seized his glass and threw it at the wall, where it exploded and sprayed juice everywhere. The water still ran in the sink, but Hakkai's hands had stopped.

"Fuck this," the hanyou muttered, scraping his chair angrily back and storming out of the door.

--

The fight persisted for some time, even after Gojyo had come back and made some semblance of apology that Hakkai accepted without so much as flinching. Instead of returning to the comfortable formality of love that they had assumed without indulging in romance, or romantic antics, though, they remained cordial, distant. Hakkai slept at the desk, or the table, or in the spare bedroom. Gojyo slept in the bedroom, in the bar, or not at all. He was angry with Hakkai, angry at how different the man had become, and angry at how their own relationship had changed.

It was raining when he came home early one Saturday morning a few weeks after their fight. It wasn't a torrent, or a storm -- just a light, warm summer rain that he actually enjoyed strolling through. He immediately thought of Hakkai, who must have bombarded himself as far away from the windows as possible, and Sanzo, who must have been smoking and brooding just then. He hadn't had that much to drink -- his winnings hadn't been very good -- and so he felt relatively clear-headed as he went into the house.

The kitchen table was empty, as was the desk (albeit still covered in graded and ungraded papers), and a peek in the spare bedroom also showed no signs of his roommate. Gojyo stood in the middle of the front room and wondered if Hakkai had finally left; he scratched his head for a moment, his emotions a victim of an internal blender. He pulled out a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and then remembered Hakkai's new policy -- no smoking indoors.

"I don't want to be a victim of secondhand smoke any longer," he had said with a smile.

Even without the other man there, Gojyo decided to obey the sentiment, and went out the door on the other end of the house that led into the backyard. It was small -- just a fat strip of grass before the forest took it over. The rain was still coming down, but he had taken pains to light the cigarette inside, and would have been content to smoke in the rain as well, if Hakkai hadn't been sitting on the grass outside.

"The hell are you doing here?" the redhead asked in surprise, reacting naturally to the shock of seeing him somewhere unexpected. Hakkai looked up at him; rain streaked his face, spattered his glasses, dampened his hair and clothes. Suddenly self-conscious, the youkai wiped his face with his hand, making sure to slip his fingers up under his glasses to wipe away the water there. Gojyo wondered how he got rain there when the glasses were protecting his eyes.

"Just sitting," Hakkai said, but his voice was hoarse.

"Just crying," Gojyo accused, the answer dawning on him.

There was a pregnant pause, and then, "Yes, maybe."

"Why?"

"It's a routine."

Gojyo glanced at him quickly, turned away, and took a drag on his cigarette. "What?"

"Every Friday, that's what happens. Even if I'm not feeling particularly upset anymore, it just happens anyway. I know it's not quite as good as a poker night, but sometimes the mind betrays the body. It happens to occur to me every time you leave for an extended period of time." Hakkai smiled, but it wasn't a happy one.

"Why?"

Hakkai cocked his head slightly, sorting through theories. "I think I've settled on PTSD. After everything happened, we really didn't get a chance to decompress, and I'm fairly certain that it's just been lying there, waiting. It's been changing me, I think. Things from the past -- like teaching, and cooking for Kanan and I, and just keeping house with you earlier. The memories think they're happening now, but in reality, they're just memories." He grinned widely at Gojyo. "Think I'm insane yet?"

Gojyo turned to him, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with his foot, and then turned to Hakkai, to whom he offered a hand up. The youkai took it, and they silently went inside.

After they undressed, and toweled off, and got into bed together, Gojyo said, "After that trip, anyone would have gone insane. I'm surprised you lasted this long."

They laughed together before they slept, and Gojyo decided that they had all been crazy from the beginning.