Note: This story, one of my first Saiyuukis, was inspired by episode 15
of the anime, Fated Guys, which is a melancholy flashback to when Gojou first
met Hakkai. It's largely narrated by Gojou, or rather by Hirata Hiroaki.
Remember that name. I think you'll be hearing of him, and hearing him, a lot.
Gojou
It was simple enough,
at the start. There were women and there were men. They looked different and
they smelled different and you said different things to them, all quite easy
and automatic. Women were for leaning close to and speaking to in a low teasing
voice and looking straight in the eye while you did it. Then they would look
away and blush and put a hand up to fend you off, or they would look straight
back at you and smile and reach to bring you near; but even when they seemed
ready to run from you like startled deer their bodies leaned towards you as if
pulled by a magnet. Then you could smell their hair and the scent that came
from between their breasts and sometimes on the outer edges of sense the scent
from between their legs. It made you dizzy and churned your insides around and
got you hard and it was like the two of you really didn't know what you were
doing after that. And when you got inside them into that warm welcoming
softness it was more wonderful than there were words for. It was coming home to
a lighted house all bright and cozy with someone waiting inside just for you,
turning to smile at you when she heard your step at the door like the day was
perfect now you were here. It was so wonderful that Gojou thought he'd die each
time it happened, from simple happiness. Only it didn't last. When it was over
there was the dark cold awakening, lying alone with a stranger beside you,
asleep if you were lucky and awake and talking if you weren't. That happiness,
that welcome, was only a dream. It hadn't happened like that. It had never been
like that. For him there'd been a dark unhappy house with no man in it and his
half-brother staying away as much as possible and his mother, the woman who'd
raised him, crying each time she looked at him until she couldn't stand looking
at him any more and had tried to kill him. That was what it was like, really,
and remembering it was the price you had to pay for feeling, for however short
a time, that it could be different.
So it was a good thing
there were men. Men were for beating at poker and beating at women. Men were
for speaking to in a hard high voice, daring them to take you on, and taking
them on when they dared. It felt good, throwing punches and taking them, and
knocking the other guy out at last, and proving that Sya Gojou didn't need
anyone to protect him from anything. And the more you did that the more the
women crowded around you and the more the men wanted to take you on, and it all
served to make the time pass at least. And sometimes when the women were too
much for you you could get drunk with a man and complain to him that women just
didn't understand, and because he was a man too he understood that even if he
didn't understand anything else about you.
So there it was. Women
were for screwing, men were for fighting, and that was the way it was. Unless
you happened to be journeying with Genjou Sanzou, and then it got confusing,
because then you found yourself fighting women, or at least females, or at
least female youkai- but since you were a male youkai yourself, or half-youkai,
then the female youkai were women presumably, even if it was only human women
who turned you on. And if you were with Genjou Sanzou, with a monk who wasn't
really a man because monks aren't men except that Sanzou drank and smoked and
swore like any man, it got even more confusing, because Sanzou had lonely dark
eyes that wanted someone to make their shadows go away and a crooking unhappy
mouth that wanted someone to kiss it into softness and a wormwood tongue that
could shrivel the skin off anyone's bones, man or youkai, and a low
contemptuous voice that seemed to get into your insides and churn them all
around so there was no leaving him alone. You had to come and lean on his
shoulder with some joke or insult just to get the smell of his skin and the
smell of his hair, and Sanzou would jerk an irritated head away with a muttered
'Korosuzo', and though you knew he meant it and might in fact some day try it, the
words still felt somehow like when the women's bodies leaned unthinkingly
towards your own. Sanzou looked at you from way far away even when you were
standing right next to him, with a crook to his mouth like he knew you were a
snotty-nosed kid who cried in bed at night from loneliness and fear, but in his
eyes you caught the same fleeting doe look as with the women, something there
and gone and hoping you would follow, so you had to follow and of course came
up against the stranger, the cold-eyed one with the red shakra in his forehead
who saw the universe from the same place as the gods, endless cycles of endless
millennia turning inside each other like enormous wheels and not to be
understood by any mortal being. Sanzou made you dizzy. Sanzou made you feel
drunk all the time. Sanzou showed up at your bedside in the middle of the night
or the middle of a siesta with his tight unhappy mouth and the dark look in his
eyes, saying nothing, and then you had to do what Sanzou wanted because it was
Sanzou who wanted it and you knew, when the chips were down, which of you was
the master even if you never let that knowledge get up to your head, because if
it did it might stop you doing what Sanzou wanted which would be too bad
because of course you wanted it too. Sanzou had a lovely smooth butt and two
lovely swelling buns and your cock slid inside them so smooth and easy it could
break your heart. But it wasn't soft and good-feeling like it was with the
women, it was like being crazy drunk and taking on a guy you knew could kill
you and maybe would kill you-- a whirling knife-edged high exactly half-way
between excitement and terror, that took you right out of yourself so you
couldn't even say what was happening or how long it went on for. You came to,
shaking and disoriented, lying half on top of Sanzou who'd already lit a
cigarette and was waiting for you to finish so he could snort a little and pass
you his cigarette to light your own from and imply without saying a word that
you were a big redhaired lunk of a haafu who screwed like an ape and that doing
it with the monkey-boy was probably better. And somehow that felt just fine
because for however long it lasted the little droop to Sanzou's mouth was gone
away.
So there were men and
there were women and there was Sanzou. And that was fine. But then there'd been
Gonou. Gonou wasn't like any of that. Gonou was completely different, even
though he was a man like the village men and like Sanzou except he wasn't like
any other man you'd ever met. You knew he was a man, all there with no pieces
missing like you might have thought otherwise, because you'd brought him home
one night when he was dying and helped the doctor shove his guts back into his
belly and stitch him up. You'd watched him sleep for a week, not bothering to
ask yourself what you were doing all this for, and brought the pot for him to
pee in in his half-conscious moments, and dribbled a little water into his
mouth when his dried tongue licked automatically over his lips. And when he
came to finally you decided you were sick of sleeping on the floor and moved
into the bed with him, perfectly comfortably, because somehow Gonou seemed to
take up no room at all on the narrow mattress even though he was nearly as big
as you were. But Gonou was like that. Gonou never intruded. Gonou never made
any fuss. He spoke in a quiet soft voice that seemed to apologize for breaking
the silence, so there was no need to answer him in the high hard way you used
with other men. He never mentioned women, so there wasn't any question of
beating him there even if there'd been any women around, which there weren't.
You couldn't beat him at cards, though that wasn't for lack of trying.
Gonou was terribly lucky at cards, and terribly unlucky at everything else, but
you only learned that a lot later. The month that he'd stayed in your room, a
nameless stranger to the end, his friendly silence had somehow gotten into your
soul. The inns and saloons where you gambled and chatted up the women got to be
too noisy and too bright, and you left early and came home to where Gonou was
lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, and smiling when you came in with his
soft-voiced 'O-kaeri' that no-one had ever said before when you came home. You
took to playing poker with him when he could sit up, and losing regularly, and
not minding, and sharing cups of Nescafe, and saying this and that to each
other, unimportant stuff that still felt good because there was another person
there to say it to, and then gradually more important stuff, like why Gonou had
woken up in your room hoping that he was dead, until for the first time in your
life you got the feeling that you actually knew somebody from the inside out,
knew what went on in the quiet recesses of that somebody's mind.
And so, when he left
suddenly, running from Genjou Sanzou who'd come hunting him down to bring him
to justice, somehow you'd had to follow after. It wasn't that you wanted to
stop him doing whatever it was he was going to do, however desperate- and you
knew now what desperately horrific things Gonou could do-- or even to stop
Sanzou from taking him. It was just... something different had come into your
life that night you'd carried him home on your back, his blood running down
your body warm and wet in the middle of the cold wet rain, and you wanted to
keep it there for as long as you could. There weren't any names for it. It
wasn't love or friendship or want or anything you'd ever heard talked of
before. It was just whatever it was you felt about Cho Gonou. And when Sanzou
took him back to be judged and Sanzou told you he was dead and Sanzou asked in
his comfortless fashion just what the hell else you'd thought would happen,
there wasn't any name for what you felt then either. It was your life gone back
to being the way it had always been, easy and pointless and empty. You cut your
hair, a pointless gesture too because it would only grow back again, and it
wasn't a sign of mourning or anything dramatic like that. It wasn't because
Gonou had told you that last night at your place that your hair, the unnatural
blood-coloured hair that signalled a half-breed, had been like a sign to remind
him who he was and what he'd done in the days when he was trying to flee from
that knowledge into the shelter of insanity or death. You cut your hair because
even though the difference was gone from your life, your life was different and
you weren't the Sya Gojou you'd been before. The girls wanted to know what was
the matter with you. There wasn't anything the matter. You'd met your brother
on the road, just for a bit, and lost sight of him again, and that was all, and
though everything was the same as before everything was quite different.
It wasn't till some
weeks later that you found out how different, when you came face to face with
Cho Gonou's body, still very much alive, with a soft-voiced smiling person in
it called Cho Hakkai, who was and was not the Gonou you'd known before.
Something had made a difference to him too. The soft uncertain face you'd lived
with for a month was firmer somehow; the puzzled eyes that had always looked
away from your own had become focussed and looked straight back at you; and
there was something intangibly stronger, harder, underlying the gentle manners,
like an invisible silken armour. Sanzou's doing, perhaps, who'd made Hakkai
face the reality of himself at last; or meeting the terrible divinities who'd
passed sentence on him, which wasn't something you wanted to think about too
much; or maybe even the half-monk's vows he'd taken and the monk's
shoulder-cloth he wore now over his ordinary clothes, signs of his new identity
and his new life. It didn't really matter what had done it, because the
difference was back in your life again, along with that inconvenient monk and
his brainless pet monkey and later on the long journey he'd insisted you all
take. Though sometimes you half-wondered, especially when Hakkai moved back
into your room without a by-your-leave or a may I, if just maybe what had made
the difference was... And dismissed the thought, because Sya Gojou, that
drifting gambler and wencher who'd never loved anybody in his life and still
didn't, could never have made that much of a difference to another human being.
MJJ
Aug-Sept, 2000