by K.A. Rose
Gensomaden Saiyuki characters et cetera © and ™ Kazuya Minekura, ENIX and TV Tokyo, 1997. Used without permission, for nonprofit fan appreciation.
(This group of reincarnates, however, is mine. I take full responsibility.)
This is a reincarnation story. Come to that, it's a reincarnation story based off of five volumes of the manga and spotty information collected on the rest of the series. In addition to that, it follows the continuum set up in my previous major outing, In My Father's House, which itself was written on limited canon. A very unstable pagoda of cards, it could be said.
Presently this story is rated R:VLS meaning it is Restricted (physical/emotional age of 17 and up) for language, some violence, crude description, and some sexual content.
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Part 1
Page 1
How the world must look to the gods. Tiny and transient,
nothing more than an ephemeral anthill whose scrambling movements blank
out in the blink of an eye.
To the immortal it behaved similarly. In five hundred
years, all movements of the sentient races could cease to surprise a person.
All their wars, their depressions, their revolutions all amounted to little
more than a brief fluctuation in a constant wind propelling humanity along
and catching the youkai up just about accidentally. And Kougaiji had been
there for most of it.
Five hundred years ago he hadn't even been certain
he'd ever live to see the throne. Now he was fighting off upstartish descendants
with a stick and struggling to find things to keep his attention for more
than a few years.
Presently he was looking into business. It was better
to say he was making an earnest effort. And even though the youkai king
had no natural inclination for the field, five hundred years can make an
expert of anyone. What had started out with a most haphazard toying with
stocks had ended up in the control of parent corporations and about three-quarters
of the world's politicians. Though he'd let most of those go. People would
start to talk if they discovered their political leader was in a literal
demon's pocket.
But it was business that had brought King Kougaiji
to Beijing, this great city of fourteen million people, where the pollution
got so bad you could see a haze around buildings a block away, and forget
about stargazing. Where the rich lived like Americans and the poor lived
so badly the muckrakers wouldn't want it to go away just so they could
have a job tomorrow. And a center of far too much commerce.
It might've just been the smog, or the wheedling
voices of a bunch of squat fat businessmen, but Kougaiji left that afternoon's
meeting with his head throbbing and feeling like he hadn't accomplished
much at all. He'd been invited to dinner at no less than four five-star
restaurants even after he'd insisted it was a bad move on their parts,
and someone had offered him their cell phone because the number in Mandarin
sounded lucky. This is how you're conducting business out here? he'd asked
them eventually. Throwing money at expensive dinner plates and convincing
yourself a good cell number will bring your branch prosperity et cetera
ad infinitum?
They'd lost him at the Latin.
And so he'd exited their offices massaging his forehead
with a hand and dragging along a briefcase with the other, once again just
vaguely wondering what everyone thought was so great about immortality
when it meant putting up with this year after year. Oh, it wasn't that
people got stupider and more vain as the centuries wore on, he knew that
much; it was just the people he ended up communicating with in the pursuit
of his affairs.
Because there was no more great war. There was no
more reason for battle. His enemies these days tried to plant false stock
information, not assassinate him in his sleep.
This was kingship, was it? Traveling the world to
look into the operations of management in one of any number of his companies,
lobbying political measures, lecturing at universities? Granted that it
was better than warmongering, which was what his father and most of his
predecessors had done, but what the irony. To have been handed this by
a man that had started out his enemy and turned into his best friend. That
priest that had had the entire profession running for cover. Who had hated
growing old but refused to let Kougaiji keep him young, and died beautiful,
and disappeared. The same with the rest of them. Kougaiji could nearly
not believe at first that it could be possible, that man meeting the same
end as everyone else on the planet. He was too good for it.
Genjo Sanzo had a pagoda erected in his honor in
Xi'an. He had a section in the history books, though it was more or less
a footnote. There were a few books out about him; Kougaiji had been on
the editor staff for half of them, and cited as a source in all but a handful.
And still none of them told the story right. That was bureaucracy for you,
that was political correctness. Last he heard, they were trying to turn
it into a fairy tale. Cho Hakkai had been replaced by a wild pig. He still
couldn't figure that one out.
He was ill-suited to be left to defend their legacies
from a romantic society. He hadn't even really known any of them until
near the end, and then they'd all disappeared one by one into the slipstream
of the stars, and he'd never found any of them again. And the world had
gone on turning without them, and the years stretched out behind the king
until everything from that time consisted of no more than a passing flicker,
just half a frame in a long, unending film reel. So untouchably minute,
so fragile and inconstant, so insignificant in the great sea of a continually
renewing life.
How the lives of men must look to the gods. When
even a mere five hundred years threatened to leave Kougaiji with nothing
to hold on to.
But he'd kept a piece of the past with him, carried
it along with him into the present. Dokugakuji he'd preserved with the
same immortality as bestowed upon himself. He hadn't been able to save
Lirin or Yaone or even his dear mother when the time had come for their
lives to end, but Dokugakuji he kept. Dokugakuji he was too afraid to let
go.
However, even great passionate romances tended to
lose a lot of the glamour after five centuries. These days the two weren't
so much in love as they were so immersed in the other that there was sometimes
difficulty telling themselves apart, which was why Kougaiji wasn't surprised
to not find the man waiting by his private aircar when he stepped out of
the office buildings on to the street. He would be back at the hotel making
phone calls, even if he hated phones. He'd be seeing to paperwork, even
if he hated writing. He'd be vaguely hoping that the sooner they wrapped
up business in this city the sooner they could get back home. And that
was the fact of it. Kougaiji wasn't going to be able to stand this place
much longer either.
So he didn't waste time in leaving the glass double
doors of the office building to pick his way over to the street and his
waiting car. He wasn't over fond of cars, but try going around on a dragon
in a city like this. If nothing else he'd have an angry letter from animal
rights groups waiting for him the next week. That wouldn't stop until he
reminded them who funded most of their campaigns in the first place.
People.
"Back to the residence, sir?" said his driver, when
he tapped on the window with a claw to get him to lower it.
"No more appointments for the day?"
"Dinner with his eminence at seven, my lord, but
until the--"
"Gods, no more dinners. The next person trying
to offer food at me is going to--"
Whatever the rest of his threat was, the king's
driver never got to hear it, for things that happened in rapid succession
that resulted in his abruptly getting cut off.
First there was a shout in gutter Mandarin that,
after a split-second pause, Kougaiji's mind had been able to translate
as "WATCH OUT!"
Followed quickly by being run over.
King Kougaiji's vision swam back into focus sideways,
lying on the filthy cement and staring numbly at rusted metal bicycle spokes
spinning down, with his side punched in in fantastic ways.
"Ah hey mister!" a voice wailed above him, tugging
at his arm until he groaned into a sitting position. "You okay? I'm real
sorry; the chain fell off an' I couldn't brake in time an'..."
Kougaiji was dimly aware of time slowing down around
him.
But... it...
"...an' anyway bikes've got right of way so it ain't..."
...It couldn't really be...
"...but m'real sorry for yer suit, mister, an' here's
yer briefcase, sorry fer dingin' it..."
"Goku?" Kougaiji said aloud.
"Heh?" the boy said obtusely, still holding the
briefcase out at arm's length. He fumbled with the position of hands and
yanked the headset off his ears. "What'd you say, mister?"
It was Goku. It was really Goku. Here, right here
on the damn streets of Beijing, filthy as a rat with a street accent so
thick you could cut it with a knife, some obscenely incoherent popular
music blasting from his removed headphones and blinking down at Kougaiji
with that same look of stupid incomprehension as he'd always had.
For the first time in a long while the edges of
the world just seemed to fuzz and go numb, like he'd entered some sort
of dream state. The words started out of Kougaiji's mouth before he could
stop himself. "Do you--"
"GUONAN!"
The king jumped in the same moment the boy did,
latter spinning around down the street by a sidewalk corner, where the
voice had come from.
Even later he'd remember how brightly his hair shone
even under the clouded sky, how his skin was nearly as pale as his shirt.
How even at a distance the glare of his eyes was ice cold.
Time didn't slow down. Time stopped. Heart stopped.
Everything stopped as Kougaiji forced himself to his feet, fought to get
his lungs to work enough to speak the name on the edge of his lips.
Not as handsome as he'd been in a past life, but
still young, a teenager, unpolished and a bit rough-hewn in ways Kougaiji
couldn't really put his finger on. The clothes and the brashness of his
face spoke of much the same lifestyle as the young boy still holding the
king's briefcase, but the voice wasn't calloused by cigarettes and the
vilest insults devised by man. Just the middle-range ones.
But then Kougaiji noticed the pitch of the voice
and that threw an awful lot of things out of balance.
"What the hell are you doing standing around like
that for?" the teenager was shouting, voice far too high to be appropriate.
"You've got ten minutes on that delivery over to Ling's, and you're five
behind on the rest of us today! Get moving!"
"B-but Shu-rin-- I ran the guy over, an'--"
"You what?"
The smaller boy floundered helplessly. "The chain
came off an' I couldn't brake in time an' I ran into 'im an' I was real
sorry an'--"
"It's fine," Kougaiji interrupted, finally succeeding
in getting to his feet. He brushed a little of the dirt off his suit habitually,
though he was sure it didn't help much.
The figure addressed as Shu-rin regarded him with
that particular glare his old self had been so well known for, turning
up nose a little as though looking down upon something halfway offensive
but is trying to be quiet about. "Not hurt, are you?" he demanded imperiously.
"Sorry for my idiot friend. But don't sue us, will ya? It'd be kinda pointless."
He stopped, noticing the intentness of the stare.
"You gotta problem?" the blond hmphed.
"Do you remember me?" Kougaiji asked desperately.
Vibrant eyes narrowed. "Should I? You some big shot?
I don't watch TV."
"I--" the king stammered.
There was a cold little chill as the realization
hit far too delayed. He'd grown so unfamiliar dealing with reincarnates
that for a moment he'd suspended what the process usually did not entail.
Most forms of memory did not transfer from body to body. This person in
front of him might have been the exact likeness and the exact personality
of one Genjo Sanzo five hundred years ago, but that was the extent of it.
Or was it? He'd found some that weren't. And he
couldn't decipher the flicker across the teen's face as he tried to extricate
himself from the scene and go back to yelling at his friend.
The one addressed as Guonan frantically pushed the
briefcase back into Kougaiji's unresisting hands and went to collect his
bike. The older one, Shu-rin, nodded a curt salutation and made to start
peddling off down the street--
"WAIT!"
He stopped.
"What's your name?" Kougaiji managed, scrambling
for something. Anything. There had to be something lurking there still,
couldn't there? It couldn't be just his wishful thinking, the way the teenager
was looking at him...
"Who wants to know?" was the answer he got.
He looked quickly from the boy's bike to Guonan,
the transport baskets attached to the rear rims. "A prospective client,"
he told the blond. "You're bicycle couriers, aren't you?"
Ah. At that the older one immediately brightened
his disposition, at the sight of a potential sale. "That's right. Xiaolong
Express Delivery Service. Light-item carry, thirty minutes or less guaranteed.
Want our office number?"
"I-- don't have a cell with me..."
"Too bad," the boy said with a shrug. "If you know
the south hutongs, find us there, won't be too hard. Sayo," he added, starting
off.
Before he knew what he was doing, Kougaiji had rushed
up and caught the boy by the arm.
"What the hell?" the teenager demanded, pulling
out of the king's grasp easily because the latter had remembered himself
and let go. "You on something?"
"Please, just listen," Kougaiji said quickly, while
in the back of his mind he could just about hear Dokugakuji telling him
how foolish this was. "Do you have any idea who you are?"
Good gods, the boy even curled his lip like Sanzo
used to. "I'm me, aren't I?" he asked, again with that voice far too high
to rightly be a boy's. "Is that enough for you or what? You're a creep.
Piss off."
"Name," the king pleaded.
"I don't give my name to nutcases," the courier
sneered. He used his freed hand to pull off a snarky salute. "Have a nice
day, mister." He shifted the wheels of his bike and changed gears and was
off again, with the little one Guonan just behind him. Guonan, headphones
back over his ears, glanced over his shoulder once just before entering
a crowded streetway.
Kougaiji started running. Thoughtless, stupid, but
he still ran, pushing past clumps of pedestrians as the two cyclists drifted
in and out of sight among the swarm, until he lost them entirely and slowed
to a stop, defeated.
Damn.
Just. Damn.
What the hell was going on? Why did he just...?
Why were they...?
Behind him, upstreet, his driver was politely but
persistently requesting they depart soon before the afternoon air traffic
picked up.
...Hadn't they gotten their little piece of Nirvana
and moved on? It was the least the gods could have done for them after
all that work. Why were they still going through samsara on Earth?
Was it a new development? Had something happened?
He was sure he would have seen them before, if they'd been reincarnating
all this time.
Goku. Sanzo. Were the other two also...?
Was it even really them? Maybe he was mistaken.
The driver's cries were getting more desperate.
Couldn't be mistaken. No. It was them. It was him.
His best friend. Here. In the city.
When Kougaiji just happened to be visiting.
And they just happened to meet.
And it just couldn't be coincidence.
And he was still so beautiful.
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