+1...
It was perhaps only natural that the first thought that drifted through his strangely empty mind as he watched was oh, please no, not again. It was the closest thing to a prayer he could have spoken - he who had been raised on his knees before a crucified martyr he hadn't believed in and reborn in a rain of death under the gaze of a goddess who hadn't cared that he didn't - and utterly futile, because Gojyo was falling to his knees, blood everywhere, gods, so much blood.
He doesn't remember that Goku screamed for Gojyo until much later, and even then, it seems more knowledge than memory, the way they moved to shelter Gojyo, the feel of a neck snapping in his hands as he dealt with the last of the youkai he was fighting. The entire evening after that is more or less lost in his mind, and isn't that familiar? but the one who'd laugh was gone - Gojyo, Gojyo - and Sanzo wouldn't understand.
The first day begins with the crystal-clear image of Sanzo's fist crashing into his face - the ring looks rather bright in the sun, he thinks later, muzzily, and the thought guides him to waking, to find Gojyo torn from his arms and a grave before him, already filled. Sanzo stands between him and the grave, as if to stop Hakkai from digging Gojyo back up, or crawling in there with him. Of course, neither is entirely an impossibility, and he's honestly not sure whether it's that or the fact that Sanzo sincerely believes he could stop him that makes him cover his face with his hands and laugh.
On the second day, Dokugakuji arrives.
The devastation written so clearly on his face is all that saves him, once he's off his dragon and within striking range. Hakkai holds himself back, enough for the youkai to start calling for truce, and then Sanzo's stepping forward, asking questions, and all he has to do is stay back and try to restrain his instincts.
There's an offer, of course. Aid, alliance - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, as Gojyo would have said - flying dragons once they're within a night's flight of Houtou, to misdirect knowledge of their proximity. The sole attraction of the prospect for Hakkai is how much closer it brings him to the place and the people he wants to destroy, those who precipitated the death he can still scarcely absorb. Sanzo, thankfully, takes the lead. Kougaiji is notably absent from this little expedition, and Hakkai wonders uncharitably whether they were worried the ikkou would shoot first and ask questions later. That line of thought has some truth to it, which displeases him, because he needs the rage right now, when it's all still raw and everything's blurry that isn't red blood on dark skin below red hair.
He doesn't bother addressing Dokugakuji. He is, after all, not Jien, and he wants to grind that name into shards beneath his heel and press them into the youkai's skin one by one, until he can hold up red blood and show him how it's precisely the wrong shade to be Gojyo's. He knows that shade intimately now, pressed against his lips and crawling under his nails like tiny fingers reaching out, and gods, he must have been delusional to think running clawed fingers through crimson hair could have prepared him for the clinging, nauseating reality of it. The only thing that stops him from tearing Dokugakuji's heart out (because he has no right to grieve, none, not when his liege's hand gave the orders, whatever his lip service to Kougaiji's neutrality) is the fact that he is grieving. It pleases Hakkai to think of him living in the knowledge that the side he chose killed his brother, that he precipitated that chain of events at least in part. Dokugakuji looks at him, a few times, briefly, guiltily, and Hakkai would wonder what he sees there - condemnation? apathy? fury? - but he really can't make himself care enough. He leaves without saying anything to Hakkai, and that, at least, shows some intelligence.
Once he's gone, Sanzo orders them to speed up. It's entirely possible the offer's a trap. Hakkai obeys, and loses himself in the mechanics of driving and watching and waiting. The night is a relief, but only from the sting of the sun in his eyes.
Madness licks at the corners of his vision as he drives, colouring the world the vermillion of his rage, a little deeper with every mile they move from the grave where the last shreds of what he could have called his soul lies.
He isn't entirely sure why he hasn't snapped yet - the lack of an appropriate target, perhaps - and Sanzo certainly isn't, to judge by the looks he likes to think he's concealing. Then again, he's hard-pressed to find an accurate definition of snapped that excludes finding the idea of human entrails intriguingly tasty and includes an intense desire to see every last youkai in their path eviscerated and dying painfully that hasn't applied to him for...well, all his life. Cho Gonou was a disaster waiting to happen, and he thinks Sanzo just might be the only (living) person to ever grasp that. Gojyo hadn't; how trustingly he'd leaned his scarred cheek against lethal hands, how fearless his mouth as it kissed away the pain of each writhing tendril of memory on his skin, as if a changed name and three clasps of silver could protect them both.
He consciously loosens his grip on Hakuryuu's steering wheel, and hopes the jolting of the jeep over the bumpy mountain trail will hide the shudders wracking his frame.
He realises, on the fourth day, that he doesn't know how to mourn someone he loves.
Mother and Father are clear enough in his memories for him to remember precisely how unconcerned he was by their presence, and their eventual absence. He remembers screaming for Kanan through the gates of the orphanage, shaking off the hands trying to pull him inside, pull him away, and while he can't see her through tears of fury and terror, he knows she must be struggling against their mother, can feel her every bit as afraid and angry, can hear her promise to find him again, and the quiet fire of hope her voice lights sustains him through his youth. (It occurs to him several years later that perhaps calling for his mother might have been a better way to play on her sympathies, all said and done, but as much chagrin as he feels that day, he decides to forgive his childhood self the moment of honesty.) Kanan...finding her again was a blessing, and yet all he can remember from those crazed, blood-filled months of searching is the desperate need to believe in her - alive, whole, still his other half, his very own calamity to cherish and smother, no matter what he became. That he found her as tainted in her mind as he'd become in his was a delightful bit of irony, the kind the storytellers love and the gods amuse themselves precipitating...and the hate they'd sunk into and heaped upon themselves poisoned what lay between them, the inexorable, sour taste of resentment slipping into the tears in their minds that the storm of their anger ripped open. Cho Gonou died hating Kanan as much as he died loving her, and Cho Hakkai is, after all, but a symbol.
This grief, though, is pure and cold, shocking and deep, leaving him breathless at odd moments, drowning him in memory at the slightest chance, a thousand associations he never knew he had, or couldn't have known he'd need so much. Sanzo smokes twice as much now - and every click of his lighter scrapes yet another exquisitely thin fragment from what remains of the form of Cho Hakkai, all the tiny anchors of his present self tearing their way out from under his skin with every time Gojyo doesn't lean forward to touch his shoulder, doesn't sit down with them at meals, doesn't, doesn't, isn't. He makes such a conscious effort to avoid thinking of Gojyo in the present tense that it tears at even his careful speech patterns, and there are times when he wonders whether it would be simpler to indulge in forgetting his...forgetting the reason for his absence, as Goku and Sanzo do, in the moments when habit overtakes grief, and an imperious hand reaches for a cigarette that isn't offered, or a briefly cheerful voice stutters to a halt over an order of beer that doesn't need to be placed, not any more. He understands the fact of their mourning without concerning himself with it; any comfort he utters would be hypocrisy, and any solace he offers a lie.
The ticking in the back of his mind is counting up now, minutes, hours, days, thunderous in the vast silence where his heart used to beat, as they drive towards the meeting-point they'd arranged, where the dragons will be waiting for them. He kills, every day now, and the other two step back and let him, guided by some instinct of self-preservation (or perhaps Goku's taken what he saw in the gourd to heart at last, Hakkai doesn't know), and having nothing but targets in his line of vision is oddly freeing. It's a privilege he hasn't had in a long time. Part of him envies the simplicity of that time, the sweeping finality of black and white, and himself the ice that moved between them, only visible by the blood that spattered on him and sank into his skin.
He thinks he eats, though he can't remember what or how much; in the past, he's pushed his body hard enough that collapsing into bed led to deep, dreamless sleep, but they can't afford that anymore, not with wave after wave of assassins, small groups, large groups, undercover and not, the threat of attack ever-present. He forces himself to take naps instead, the jeep bumping and shuddering under Sanzo's inexpert handling, the passenger seat infinitely more comfortable than huddling up against a fire that blinds his night vision. The details of days and nights blur away, soft around the edges like he remembers his vision turning when he overextends his qi just enough to weaken without sliding all the way into unconsciousness. It occurs to him that perhaps it isn't healthy, that he can't remember exactly how many days it's been, because all he can feel when he closes his eyes is the way Gojyo's blood felt on his skin, and all he knows is the fading warmth of his body in his arms, and he could give a fuck about his state of mind, really. Oblivion is infinitely merciful by comparison.
Conversation in the jeep dwindles to almost nothing. Sanzo sleeps, or drives, grimly silent when he's awake. Goku tries to strike up conversation a few times, but the words drop against the background rumble of wheels on rocky roads like pebbles into the ocean, drowned out and lost, and it's not long before he's subsided into anxious silence. In another time, Hakkai would comfort him. An extra dish added to his dinner or a quiet, reassuring conversation...but in another time Gojyo would have kicked his shin and started a quarrel long before now, and everything would have been all right, and in that light it seems worthless to even make the effort.
He wonders, sometimes, about how loud Gojyo's absence is in the jeep, whether it's a quality of negative space that sings with the scent of the person who used to occupy it. Would it have been so if they'd had their quiet little life in their quiet little house, reminders everywhere of what's gone, or if he could have washed Gojyo from the walls and wiped him meticulously off the furniture, stripped down and built up until he could pretend his solitude was a matter of aesthetics. If, in another universe, he could have listened to his love being called insignificant, nodded and turned back, picked up the pieces of her smashed flower vase and swept them and her out of his neat little house, leaving no shards of memory underfoot where he might tread carelessly upon them. Perhaps he could have, in another life, and yet his mind stutters to a halt when he applies that fantasy to Gojyo, as if what he felt when Kanan was taken from him was but a pale echo of this. The rage he felt then was cold and sharp as steel pressed to skin, the desire for vengeance, to carve his pound of flesh from the heart of the world; this drive to destroy is fierce and ageless, deliberate and all-encompassing, more loss than he thought a life could hold or a soul could bear. Every inch of skin that Gojyo's touched would burn if he forgot, he thinks - except he's learned how to forget, hasn't he, somewhere in the tangle of birth and death that his life has become? He'd think it was self-preservation, but he doesn't have any left.
The rhythm of his body as he moves to kill matches the ticking of his life, each death adding to the time he has left, staving off the need for mindless slaughter that much longer. Cho Hakkai was a construct of Sanzo's grace and Gojyo's love, and without Gojyo all that's left is to stand as long as he can by Sanzo's side, and they're so close to Houtou he can almost taste it, just a little longer, just a little
(besides, part of him whispers, this way you don't have to go looking for them)
longer and then he can let go, unleash himself entirely. Surviving Houtou would be a disappointment to him, but not nearly as bad for him as it would be for everyone else there. He recognises this impulse in himself, and it has nothing of reason in it, beyond the cold calculation of where best he can kill how many, where he can best arrange not to survive the encounter. He's fairly sure the others will understand, not that it would concern him deeply if they didn't; he owes them no more than this, at the end of the day.
Perhaps carrying a blade would be useful, he catches himself thinking on the tenth day. It brings a rueful sort of smile to his lips. It would be so easy to give in, to melt back into what he was. Some might say he's already there, but he isn't, not really; Cho Gonou was above all a creature of purpose, and what drives his new life is anything but. Nor is this the instinct-driven unlimitered form he knows from brief battles (and from Gojyo in bed, smiling down at him, wicked mouth tracing the sharp edges of claws, rocking against him, shuddering and gasping and arching back with the delicate ripple of vines over skin, but if he thinks too much about that, he'll break, and he can't yet). Instinct only goes so far, and always to further what the rational mind will not permit, and he feels perfectly in alignment, body, mind, soul and the gaping wound that is where Gojyo isn't.
Each evening, crouched over low tables in the few inns that struggle to survive on the road, or over the small fires they dare to build to mitigate the biting wind that sweeps down from the mountains that tower over them, they study the maps Kougaiji's provided, ensuring they're headed in the right direction. Hakkai contributes the bare minimum, letting Sanzo pick their path. Every ambush is just more fodder for him, after all, as long as he manages to survive the first surprise. Goku curls up with Sanzo at nights, after, not even pretending to be happy to sleep alone anymore, and it's a mark of Sanzo's state of mind that he permits it, pressing his back to Goku's, even allowing him to clutch back at his hip in his sleep. Hakkai watches them while they sleep, unblinking, something to fix his eyes on while his other senses seek the dark for the rank auras of attacking youkai, the Wave something he can almost smell on them this close to the heart. He'd planned out little futures for himself, idly spun dreams of vegetable gardens, and if those little fantasies had included the other three around a table, and perhaps Gojyo's body pressed up against his in a solid line of heat against rainy nights as Goku presses himself to Sanzo now, was it really too ambitious for the gods to countenance?
No matter; it's ashes now, what's left of it lying in an unmarked grave, and all he can do is rage against the monstrous injustice that leaves him alive, time and again, and tears his loved ones from him instead. Still, he can't help but think, better him than Gojyo; better to endure this than to imagine him limping on for years, unable to give up and unwilling to let go. The few times he's let himself calculate that, he's been forced to abandon any plans of early death he might have cooked up. Unfortunately, he's far less considerate than Gojyo is, and no amount of knowing that Gojyo would want him to go on can overtake his essential selfishness. He supposes that's why Gojyo never asked him to.
