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Fourth Beat
Day 8
How are you today? Better?
Better, thanks.
The sarcasm was more than established.
Kougaiji was in the room, he'd been told, but out of Sanzo's rather pathetic range of vision. Still, he could tell the man was pacing, stopping now and then to needlessly get his eyes on Sanzo when he spoke. It was useless explaining to him how very little proper conversational conduct mattered here; the prince almost hid inside it as a defense.
The sedative, or tranquilizer, or whatever the hell Sanzo had been given had left behind a godsawful headache. Were the priest's agitation not already very much at its limit, it might have been enough to put him off from conversation. As it was, Kougaiji's thoughts ringing inside his head was only a barely tolerable agony. Tolerable, because it seemed even worse to be left alone.
Apart from the whole thing yesterday. I mean, I never did get to ask how you were after the other night.
If Sanzo had been physically speaking to the prince, right around now he would have rolled his eyes, growled, and coldly ordered Kougaiji to fuck off for asking after his well-being. The problem was, apart from it being intensely difficult to lie or dodge inside your own head, it was hard to get one's defenses back up after they'd been knocked down. Try as he might.
Things were getting comfortable. They had to face that. Whether it was a happy truth or not.
He said, I just don't understand why.
They're your friends, aren't they?
I don't know. Do you consider those servants of yours friends?
Hesitation.
Ah, Sanzo said in the silence, with distinct satisfaction. It's not as simple as all that, is it?
But you care about them, don't you?
I don't know.
Goku?
I worry what kind of trouble he'll get in. That's different.
You notice when he's gone.
You notice when a piece of furniture is gone from a room. It doesn't imply an advanced sense of attachment.
Attachment. Your word.
What do you want from me?
Honesty, I suppose. I mean full honesty. Not this half-baked
shit you pullluke-warm version.
What do you want me to say? I love them all very dearly?
Only if you really do.
I doubt it.
So, what?
I don't want them to be dead.After being around
them so long, being apart doesn't seem natural. Honestly.
Do you think they're dead?
No. I hope not.Probably not. They'd've died without
last rites and they'd probably hang around me as ghosts just to be obnoxious.
Although--
He hovered at the edge of something. It felt like the edge of a cliff, something that, once over, meant there was nothing to do but fall.
Yes? Kougaiji prompted, after a long period of radio silence.
I used to get nightmares, he admitted finally. That they would all die on me, and I'd be alone.
...And yet to say it, at least in thought, wasn't quite as painful in embarrassment as Sanzo anticipated it would be. It was just painful.
Genjo... Kougaiji murmured.
And then, static. Jumbled white noise, as though their link had just come under heavy interference.
What's going on? Sanzo said quickly, forcing everything into the thought to make it powerful, their only equivalent to a yell.
It seemed like an eternity before the line quieted, and Kougaiji said, Sorry. Someone came in.
They hadn't had time to get used to what happened when Kougaiji's mind was preoccupied dealing with another individual. The small burst of it Sanzo had felt the other night when Kougaiji was speaking with Dokugakuji was the only notable incident, in fact. And for that, in between the loud incomprehensible brain-noise, there had been quite a bit of latent thought Sanzo was sure Kougaiji didn't even recognize as going on, and would have made the priest turn red with embarrassment if he wasn't so used to how Gojyo had spoken on a regular basis.
I have to go.
Why?
SHE wants a word with me, apparently. I don't like this.
So just don't go.
It's not that simple.
Sanzo conceded, however unwillingly. He knew how that was quite well himself.
Keep talking until you're out of range? Sanzo suggested.
I'll try.
~*~
Gyokumen Koushu seldom left the primary laboratory these days. This was because what was now called the primary laboratory had once been Gyumaoh's throne room.
Now temporary walls had been erected that blocked off sight of the reviving King from the general view, only the sounds of whirring and electric crackling permeating into the hall. There was still a throne, of a sorts, up on one of the scaffolds looking down upon the room's occupants, and Gyokumen was the only one to ever sit in it.
She was sitting in it when Kougaiji entered, trying not to appear like he was shuffling unaccustomedly in court robes, and trying not to stare at the thick coils of cable and wire crisscrossing the flagstones.
"Ah," came a voice, "there's our man of the moment." Tone so calm it was all he could do not to grind his teeth with irritation, a voice that reeked of superficial courtesy, like anyone hearing it should be grateful the speaker was in such a good mood that they weren't dead yet.
Kougaiji had to nearly crane his neck to see her, up on the tall platforms. She rose as he watched, folds of her dress cascading elegantly as she stood. His mother's dress. She'd taken the liberty of helping herself to his mother's wardrobe quite readily, upon her own revival.
"You wished to see me?" he said, as plainly and levelly as he could manage.
"I'd like not to have sent someone out looking for you to have my summons granted. But you seem to be scarce these days, Kougaiji."
Should be, 'your highness,' the prince thought contemptuously. He might not have been particularly fond of his title, but he'd be damned if such a woman could think to address him so informally.
But he said nothing.
Which didn't even seem to be noticed by the lady-youkai, as she collected up the clipboard she habitually kept at her side, and began to descend the nearest staircase. "I wonder," she said languidly, that sort of casual tone she probably assumed nobility were just supposed to have, "if perhaps our recent progress has not been to your liking, dear."
"What do you mean by that?"
"What is it you feel for that human priest?"
His jaw clenched for a moment, an action hopefully going unseen. Dokugakuji had warned him about this quite strenuously, of how it would be a very bad thing indeed if even Gyokumen had started to actively notice his behavior.
"What are you suggesting?"
"Merely that it's my sincerest hope that my dear love's first-born isn't to be found falling prey to..." --she smiled a wolfish little grin-- "...unorthodox sentiments."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Gyokumen smiled again, just as malevolently. "Tell me," she said in obvious topic change, reaching the bottom of the stairs. "Are you anticipating your father's return?"
"We were never what you could call close."
"But all youkai wish for the return of the King. It's instinctual within them to long for a strong ruler. Unless you feel you could provide that."
He said nothing.
"No, of course not," she said. There was a hint of disappointment there, as if she really expected him to start arguing in favor of socialism in her presence. "Things will be better for everyone once your father returns. So it really is not proper that his son be seen possessing sympathy for some creature that can't even rightly be called an enemy anymore. It's little more than a doll now, you know."
Doll? She thinks he's a doll?
I'm a what?
...You're still here?!
Kougaiji twitched visibly, and Gyokumen, lacking the right context, interpretted it just as some ethical objection to her choice of words.
"It's really all that human is now," she told him. "Barely alive. Surely not even aware of what's happening to it, much less in possession of any means to escape. You of all people should know just how badly damaged it was when we recovered it; it's only by grace of Dr. Nii's machines that it even survives to this moment."
Kougaiji felt his stomach twist, and wished he could go off somewhere to be sick in private. The growing sensation of illness was making his head spin.
Sanzo felt it. And somehow, needed nothing more to understand. Only shared the sensation.
"So you really are wasting your time, dear," she said finally, so abruptly that Kougaiji's ears twinged. "You impress no one with this show of remorse. Or whatever it is you might think you're feeling."
"Don't be foolish."
"No? Then what is it that takes you to that room every day, on those occasions you're awake?"
"Is it forbidden?"
"Naturally not. You're the prince of this castle; you may go where you like. But I ask you don't worry others so with your behavior. What would your mother think of this little obsession, I wonder?"
For a moment, Kougaiji felt his heart clang dead to a halt.
Mother...
A series of flashes in his mind, not called up by his own will-- soft laughs and comforting touches and a sweet smiling face, calm spring days out in the fields-- and knowing that Sanzo saw it too and couldn't even comprehend the wealth of emotion, had no common ground of experience, hadn't had parents-- Just felt and hurt and nearly crumbled beneath it--
"Don't speak of my mother," Kougaiji said quietly, his throat tightening of its own will as if hoping it could stop the words from being loud enough to be heard.
Not enough.
"What was that, boy?"
Back down, damn it.
It might have been Sanzo's thought, might have been his own, he couldn't even tell. The answer was still no.
"I said, don't talk about my mother."
Gyokumen laughed glassily, as if this was what she had been waiting for. "Does the guilt of failure weigh heavily, Kougaiji?"
Shut up.
"You've every right to feel terrible. A million and one chances to fulfill our bargain when you were only deserving of one, and still you managed to fail. No one can be blamed for your mother's condition except you."
Shut up.
"And naturally, with my dearest's coming revival, it would be such an uncomfortable state of affairs if that statue there were still around..."
He couldn't breathe. His stomach felt like it had been slashed open and guts spilled out on the floor.
"You wouldn't...!"
"You leave me with very little choice, don't you?"
"Don't you touch her!--"
"Her fate was in your hands!" the lady-demon snapped back, cutting him off. Her eyes flared. "You failed her and now you may both suffer the consequences. Do not direct your anger at me."
Kougaiji may have been hyperventilating, if his breaths weren't coming so ragged and uneven. Claws cut into the palms of tightly-clenched fists.
"I won't let you. You'll have to kill me first!"
A mirthless laugh. "Now, don't be silly, Kougaiji. Why would I ever wish harm upon my beloved's first-born?" She leaned close to him. "All things in good time, dear."
She snapped her fingers.
Guards he hadn't even known were in the room were on him in a second, deathgrips on his arms that stayed fast even as he struggled, lashed out with an unknown ferocity, some deep-seated fear of being touched that he had never experienced before, hated the contact, hated the entrapment with such panic that it could only be called primal.
"Let me go!" he screamed at them, unheeded, falling off balance and reduced to being dragged off toward the door. "I fucking order you to let me go!"
Ah, silly. Like they'd ever listen to you. "Please take his highness to his quarters," Gyokumen Koushu instructed with sick sweetness. "He's had a very trying few days, and needs his rest, the poor dear."
"You bitch!" he shrieked, any last semblance of self-control gone now, intent to break his arm in the effort to get out of the guardmen's hold. "I'll fucking kill you if you touch her!"
"Poor Prince Kougaiji. Hysterical, you see. It's the stress."
"GYOKUMEN!"
The shout rang throughout the hall, rattling every particle in air. A cry so singularly powerful, not just from volume or the echo of the high-arched walls, but for the pure unfiltered rage with which the prince screamed it, that it seemed the entire castle must have heard.
Sanzo heard, far away in his blocked-off room, the wires and cables creaking under heavy strain as he struggled with unheardof strength and purpose. Choked streams of bubbles gurgled out of his respirator mask, the effort to scream the foulest curses strangled dead in an instant, and still he kept fighting.
This was fury such as Sanzo had rarely ever, ever touched with, an anger so violent it threatened to physically rip him apart. It was anger so thoroughly focused down to a single point, target, and anything, everything else fell secondary to it.
He hadn't heard anything of the conversation, had only heard the snatches of echoes of things that jangled inside Kougaiji's head, but the emotion travelled light years and just as fast, and a hundred times more vocal and articulate than words would ever be. It was so strong that there wasn't even a chance for more rational thinking to prevail. It transcended everything. The fact that it was an anger from another person's mind meant nothing when Sanzo's brain was interpretting it as his own.
Sanzo had never heard Kougaiji's story about his mother's condition, but didn't need to. He had no memory of a mother, had no concept of how they were supposed to make a person feel, could never begin to relate.
But Sanzo did know what it was to want to protect someone, and to have them ripped away from you because you weren't strong enough.
And that linked the prince's pain to his own. That was all the mind needed to make its association. That was all he needed to be angry.
He wanted revenge. More than ever, he wanted out of this tank, in control of his own body, to kill someone. That woman.
It wasn't avenging Kougaiji. Kougaiji was not a factor in his brain. The prince could not even be dismissed as an element in the equation. Sanzo couldn't differentiate at all now, in the heat of this rage, whose emotions and thoughts were whose, it just all rolled together into a single mass of uncensored hatred and loathing and malevolence.
Around him, unnoticed for how his mind still screamed silent insults and threats, the threaded coils of aural energy spun and contorted.
Atoms, colliding with one another or struck with a photon, will find their electrons moved into upper orbits around their nuclei, and scientists describe the atom as being in an "excited" state. The threads of magic, or spiritual power, or both depending on who you asked, behaved similarly, but they didn't just respond to light waves.
You would be hard pressed to find a scientist willing to acknowledge that emotion or thought functioned on a wavelength. Or that when subatomic particles not related to atoms at all were accelerated, the things got more than just excited. They got violent.
A doll, was he? Just a useless, lifeless thing strung up on wires and used as some goddamn AC adapter? He'd show her.
Above him, a dull clunk, as one of the cables snapped and began to fall.
~*~
"Let go of me!" Kougaiji yelled again, voice raw from the effort, muscles screaming the the fatigue of useless thrashing. "What the fuck do you idiots think you're doing?!"
None of them answered, not willing or caring too. He twisted his wrist around far enough and got his claws into a forearm, and was barely rewarded with a wince before someone else's fist connected with his jaw.
Hands released him, and he fell hard on cold stone, head banging painfully even as his throbbing jaw started to numb. There was heated argument he couldn't catch the details of, scuffling of too many feet in his dimming field of vision, wondering when the strength had gone out of him that he couldn't even fight back.
The spat between the guards was settled far too quickly, and muscular hands picked him up again. But one hand around his arm had a grip slightly gentler, and Kougaiji swung his head up to catch the visage of Dokugakuji flashing a brief reassuring smile before silently discouraging him from making any sort of reaction.
Kougaiji obeyed without thought, as best he could. Too disoriented to make much more of the situation.
At a fork in the hallway the guardsmen and Dokugakuji came to a halt, and argument broke out again.
"Where d'you think you're takin' 'im?" one demanded.
"To his quarters," Dokugakuji answered. "As ordered."
"Whaddya mean, his quarters? When the lady says 'take him to his room,' it ain't meant to take a direct path o' meaning," a second guard said, clearly the elaborate thinker of the group.
"Yeh. There's room out back 'hind the kitchens. Could beat the shit outta him an' no one'd ever hear," added a third, not such the subtle one.
"I know what Gyokumen-sama meant," Dokugakuji snapped at them, rolling well with this change in the situation. It seemed the man had a heretofore undiscovered talent for impromptu acting. "But you're just couriers. It's me and my men who get to do it, so fuck off."
"Eh? 'Fuck kinda sense does that make?" the first one whined, very disappointed.
"You got a problem with it?" Dokugakuji asked, the challenge dripping off every syllable. "Take it up with Gyokumen."
A brief silence fell in which it seemed the rest of the guards were very carefully considering how Gyokumen Koushu would take to being interrupted over something as evidently petty as who got to beat up her almost-step-son.
The other hands on him slowly, cautiously eased and removed their grip.
"There's bright boys," Dokugakuji said with satisfaction. "Now run along and go find some scullery maids to molest or something, before I kick your asses for crowding up the hallways. Retards."
Kougaiji was aware of feet slowly shuffling away.
When the sounds were gone all but for Dokugakuji's breathing, he opened his eyes a little. His jaw still ached terribly, but the swelling hadn't started yet, so his speech was not impeded. "You know that if you didn't look like an officer, you'd never have gotten away with that."
"Ifs. Let's forget hypotheticals for a bit, huh?" his servant said, in a far gentler voice than he'd employed on the guards before. The hold on Kougaiji's arm shifted and another hand came down to hook him around the shoulder, and he pulled the prince to his feet as easily as if he were a rag doll.
Who fell just as limply as one once Dokugakuji let go. His hands rushed back to Kougaiji's shoulders just as he started to tip.
"Whoa! Hey! Are you all right?" he asked, steadying him again.
Kougaiji mustered just enough strength to reach up a hand, bent over Dokugakuji's own in the odd positioning, to massage his forehead. Or at least push his palm up against it, in the hopes that the pressure would somehow alleviate the headache coming on with a vengence.
"What happened in there, Kou?" his servant murmured, barely above a whisper.
His mouth twinged, and a sting started up at the bottom of his eyes. He swallowed to keep his throat from seizing up.
I don't want to have to tell you.
Why do I even want to?
Genjo?
No answer.
Kougaiji's arm fell down to his side in wordless defeat. He told him.
Dokugakuji, who had kept a strong reign on himself up until that point, ground his jaw and pressed his lips into a thin, angry little line. "We won't let her."
The prince began to shake his head. "How can you--"
"We'll find a way. Somehow. We'll figure it out. We're not-- I'm not going to let it happen, do you understand?"
I don't understand. Why do you care?
He was so disoriented. Ideas were hitting his brain and just bouncing right off again. It was as though some crucial lever or switch in the elaborate mouse trap that made a sentient mind had been broken, and everything else was clicking and whirring fruitlessly without sense or purpose or direction or product. Connections he could have normally made, about people and why they thought what they thought or said what they said, seemed an incomprehensible mess. It was the kind of confusion a person experiences when even the basic fundamentals of life don't seem to add up for no other reason than that they'd never been looked at objectively before.
Dokugakuji shook an unresisting shoulder. "Kou? Are you okay? Say something, man."
I'm tired.
He mumbled it.
"Let's take you to your room-- your real room," Dokugakuji clarified quickly, before the guards' remarks could make their reappearance in memory. "I'll get Yaone to bring up some dinner. Have you even been eating lately?"
"Am I under surveillance or something?"
"You don't need to be when you go around looking half-dead."
Why not? Some people are even closer to it to me, and they're not complaining.
"Come on," his companion said decidedly, taking the prince's silence as acquiescence. He slipped one arm down and under, around Kougaiji's waist to hold him aloft better, since he didn't seem he was going to be able to walk unaided for a while yet.
Silence for a while, as they walked down blessedly empty hallways. And then Dokugakuji hissed out a small, mostly humorless laugh. "Beyond me how you could fall under so quickly, with how much you were yelling before..."
"I don't understand it," Kougaiji said gruffly. "It's like something's sucking everything out of me."
"It's this goddamn castle," Dokugakuji decided adamantly. "Pressing you in on all sides, person could suffocate in a place like this."
"What, you're suggesting I take a holiday?"
"I say, rest first. Anything out from there is a bonus."
~*~
It would never be fully elaborated on how they'd orchestrated it, but Yaone was there with tray of food waiting when Dokugakuji arrived with their master in tow. Kougaiji barely had time to register the soppy puppy-dog eyes and the plate of more food than he'd seen in three or four days' time before flopping down bodily into bed, passed out before he even felt the pillow.
Yaone, slightly embarrassed, carefully laid the tray down on a table.
"What happened to him?" she whispered, after both could verify his breath had fallen into a steady in-out and he was fully asleep.
"You mean today, or over the course of his whole life?" Dokugakuji said bitterly. "Goddamn, everything's so screwed up..."
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