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Twelfth Beat
Day 21
Just past midnight now.
No moon overhead brought the stars overhead out in sharp clarity, glaring down white, sterile, and cold. Autumn was closing in and made the nights bite at skin unprotected by more than clothing and threadbare sleeping bags. They'd lost their tents.
At night it was a risk to light a fire, but they had to. The cold was unbearable otherwise, getting right in and singing across old scars and battle-worn joints and straight to the heart. No, they had to light a fire, no matter what the risk was. They could always try to fend off what came for them.
Goku actually had moments now where he did not cry, and the pocket of silence that his sobs were meant to fill made it even harder for the other two to keep up their resolve. Every day wore at them like waves pounding on the rocks, dissolving, gnawing at bit by tiny bit until they were all sure they were going to crack, to finally break down, to give consideration to suicide. They even welcomed the sting of the hypocrisy as a pain more than deserved. The bloodstained maten sutra held in Hakkai's hands or secreted close to his chest was a reminder for all of them.
They had failed. A total, final failure. A failure worthy of the wrath of heaven, if only it would have the mercy to strike them down where they sat, huddled in the forest outskirts. But heaven was silent even as they felt the guilt pressing down on their backs and shoulders, weighing heavily on their necks and wrists and ankles like ethereal shackles of damnation for this sin.
It had been years. And they had finally come to the end, and suddenly all those years of horrible struggle and hardship meant nothing; all those secret promises, those hard-to-reconcile emotions, their devotion and their loyalty and fealty-- all thrown aside, all useless when it was needed most.
And yet they knew, in a way that lay deep in their guts and in their very bones, that Genjo Sanzo was not dead.
They had stayed here, now for well in excess of a month, strategizing just for some crucial flaw to dash all plans and have them start over from scratch, as supplies dwindled and everyone's health and sanity waned, waiting and hoping and almost damn near praying for something to present itself, but nothing.
But they would not leave. They couldn't. Even as Gojyo announced it the words would fall out from under him, as all three realized that it was a physical impossibility to give up now. That the ties that bound them all to this had now all wrapped tight. Like nooses around their necks.
The suffocation was a tension. The tension became a sickness. It wrapped over Goku and threw him into tears, but Gojyo and Hakkai could not so easily let themselves fall apart. At times they even turned to each other to hold themselves together.
Gojyo had his women and Hakkai did what he liked and kept quiet about it, but in the end everything defaulted back to the two of them. It just seemed natural, in a way they were unable to describe. Now, they knew, it was completely inappropriate, to be doing this when their party's third member was in such agony, when their fourth member was gone and who knows what had happened to him. Not when it felt like such a disgrace to Sanzo to soak in each other's feeble warmth when they'd both tried at one point or another to draw the man in with them.
That same part that kept throwing them back together should have been warning that Sanzo was not worth it. But instead that part had been tugging at them to pull him in and not let go. Like perhaps, just maybe, it was going to complete them somehow. If only they hadn't been totally inept at the task and both thrown out in the cold.
Come to that, that was a failure too. It might have seemed trivial compared to anything else, but the guilt stung all the same. The vague hope they had both possessed that, upon realizing they were helpless against their attachment for their leader, that one of them or maybe both of them might be able to get through to Sanzo and get that twisted dried-up heart to wake up and start to beat. Who knows. It might have even changed things. Changed something. Changed him, maybe.
And now... Now.
Now the absence hurt so bad they only wished they could just fall into tears like Goku had managed. If only it could help.
Some time after midnight Hakkai slowly approached Goku and started coaxing him to go to sleep. The boy complied nearly without protest these days, though that made it even harder to watch. And when Hakkai had seen him to bed he joined Gojyo by his side on a log near the fire, and murmured something about the kappa needing his rest too.
When only silence replied, Hakkai ducked his head. He hunched forward, the fatigue showing on him suddenly like a second skin.
"Did you ever think... it would end this way?"
Gojyo chewed on his twig a little in thought. He'd run out of cigarettes two weeks ago.
"I never really thought it was gonna end," he admitted finally.
For a while, the two only watched the fire, and past it, their group's junior member reaching out in his sleep and tugging Hakuryuu in close to him, like a teddy bear. The dragon suffered this silently and tried to adjust a wing.
"How old is he?" Hakkai asked, putting an end to silent musing on the sight.
"He's eighteen, isn't he?"
"He was eighteen six years ago."
"How old are you?"
"I'm twenty-two, Gojyo. You know that."
"You were twenty-two six years ago."
Hakkai pursed his lips and stared fixedly at the fire. His monocle glowed with reflected oranges and reds.
"It would seem a cruel cosmic joke," he said eventually, bitterness edging up in his voice, "that for all our time together we don't even have the years to show for it."
"Cruel cosmic joke. I think that covers just about everything."
Gojyo spat out the twig.
In the forest, something snapped.
They had barely enough time to register the yelp, before the air exploded around them. Hakkai threw rapid-fire chi blasts like bullets, the quickly-summoned shakujo swung and sent whole branches of trees falling, and even the abruptly awakened Goku was starting to throw rocks with what sounded like inhuman accuracy.
After a few moments, the patch of trees was nothing but a smoldering crater.
Then, to the three's astonishment, something moved in the trench in the earth.
It was a patch of white cloth, attached to a stick, waving back and forth in feeble franticness.
"Gods you guys!" the owner of the white flag was crying, voice breaking. "It's just me!"
Gojyo did not so much dismiss his shakujo as lose the concentration needed to keep it corporeal.
"...Dokugakuji?"
"Is it safe now?" the warrior called back, by way of reply.
In a moment, even before the ground started to cool, the situation was totally different. The two parties met each other midway, and Dokugakuji immediately wrapped his bother in a great bear hug before he had time to protest.
"Gotta say," he said as he released Gojyo, "you guys are better than coffee on a long night."
"Glad to be of service," Gojyo muttered back. He started to wonder about the white flag, but noticed the rough cut to the bottom of Dokugakuji's sleeve, and decided not to ask.
They bumped fists hollowly. "I'm so glad you guys are all right," Dokugakuji told the younger man. "We didn't know, y'know, after the siege..."
"Sanzo," Hakkai said. Almost blurted out.
"...That's why I'm here."
Even Goku was edging closer to the circle of conversation now. All three went silent as Dokugakuji started to explain.
"Without going into a lot of detail, it falls like this. There's no more rivalry. There's no more pretending to be enemies. We're on your side now. Kougaiji's made his choice," Dokugakuji said, his voice taking on a quality they'd rarely heard from him. "He's working with Sanzo and has been for a while. How long, I don't even know."
"Then he's alive," whispered Hakkai. "He really is..."
The warrior inclined his head. "Alive is just about the extent of it. He's in no place to escape anytime soon, with or without your guys' help. I'm not here to help get him out. We need you guys to get in."
"Without him fighting with us? There's no way," Gojyo said flatly.
Dokugakuji and Hakkai shared a look then, both seeming to be recalling times when Gojyo would have been loathe to acknowledge dependency on the priest in any way whatsoever.
"If you can get in, everything else will be done for you," Dokugakuji explained. "Maybe not even that. Just close enough for your sutra to start reacting to the other four."
Hakkai lost himself for a moment and his mouth fell open, before he managed, "But wouldn't that--"
"This is Sanzo's plan. We all know what the risk is, but Sanzo seems pretty damn sure of it, from what Kougaiji's said." The three had a moment to mentally wonder at what, precisely, were the dynamics of this intercommunication, before the swordsman added, "If I had a choice I wouldn't do it either. But we're out of options and we're just about out of time."
"Any day now?"
"Any day now." He looked at each of them. "You can feel it, can't you? Even if you're not full youkai?"
"But it's suicide," Hakkai argued. "Taking the sutra to you would do nothing but revive the King faster."
"Yes," Dokugakuji said wretchedly, "but-- look-- if you can believe this, the difference is Sanzo thinks he could control it that way."
The monocle could have fallen right off Hakkai's face, for how wide his eyes were now. "Control... the revival?" he croaked.
"And end it."
"No."
"Yes."
"How--?"
"I don't really know. All I know is that Sanzo's sure of it. And Kougaiji's behind him completely. And... well... whatever else I could say for it, with those two working together, I think anything they do has got a shot."
It was Goku that spoke up this time. Voice ragged and scratched, almost too quiet to be heard in the darkness.
"How do we know you're really telling the truth?"
Dokugakuji's eyebrows arched. He matched Goku's stare for a few seconds, then turned to Gojyo and Hakkai, found that the sudden doubt had settled in there as well.
He shrugged. "I know it sounds suspicious. That's why Kougaiji asked me to give you guys this," he said, reaching into a sleeve and extracting a slip of paper. He paused for a moment in who to hand it to, and settled on giving it to Hakkai, since the man seemed to have fashioned himself as the interim group leader at the moment.
Hakkai took it after a bit of hesitation, glanced up while unfolding it to see Dokugakuji's look insist, no, he didn't know what it said, and then turned his eyes to the message written inside, in Kougaiji's distinctive old-fashioned scrawl. It was a single line.
His brow furrowed, just for a moment, and then his whole face relaxed a little, as he looked up. "All right," Hakkai said, folding the paper over again.
And that was all either of his companions needed. Nothing made Hakkai look like that unless he was resolutely sure of something. They could trust that expression completely.
"When do we leave?" Gojyo said.
"How long do you guys need?"
~*~
The message had been in the demon prince's distinctive script transplanted messily to Mandarin, but still somehow coming off sophisticated, which was one of the few holdovers from a 500-year-old royal education he hadn't managed to dispel. And it had been a single line. Nothing more was needed, or wanted, or possible to say.
It said, "His name is Kouryuu."
~*~
It was the 28th day.
First quarter moon.
Now.
~*~
tictictictictictictictic
Today.
Are you ready?
Kougaiji willed his eyes open, and then winced at the strong light. For a moment, the white burned and left aching purple spots in his vision, until he adjusted and was able to make sense of what he was looking at.
He wasn't in his cell anymore. This was one of the laboratories, the ones they'd taken him to a few times before when his servants had brought him back from battle bruised and bloody and broken, to awaken with a numbness in artificially mended bones and the back of his throat feeling like sandpaper. Sometimes he'd woken up with needles in his skin. Like now. He set about pulling them off again, noting the scattering of marks all over his forearms and wondering if they might eventually stop doing this to him for no other reason than that they'd run out of places to puncture.
tictictictictictictictictictic...
He'd been stripped to his waist, left only in his pants worn under his robes, and no shoes. It was cold, but he could stand that. What was harder to put up with was Sanzo's self-consciousness passing itself off as his own, wanting very badly to cover up when he'd never given a second thought to running around half-naked in all his life.
tictictictictictictictictictictictic...
Kougaiji's eyes followed the rapid clicking to its source, in time to see the spinning silver chamber of a pistol swung up and snapped into place.
He stared at it.
"Recognize this?" Nii asked, waving the gun in his hand as he sat reclined into an office chair. "I believe you should, whoever's in your head right now. You've come up against it enough times. Smith and Wesson M.10, standard K frame, wood grip, five-slot chamber, three-inch compact barrel, sight good for standard velocity .38 Special 158 SWC at twenty-three yards."
"Twenty-five yards," Kougaiji corrected immediately, before he could stop himself, and still unable to take his eyes off it.
Nii inclined his head in mock congeniality. Then he added, "Not his, of course, that was destroyed or lost. This is a replica we ordered in from Bombay. But it's nice craftsmanship, though, don't you think?" He brought it closer to him and examined its edge, then glanced up, smirking. "The barrel, of course, not standard size, but custom. If I was a particular proponent of Freud I could be hazarding a guess on something right now."
Kougaiji didn't even have the ability to listen to it. In his head two sets of memory were replaying a conversation.
click. "That'll do, pretty boy."
"You climbed up here?"
"And tore my robes in the process, thank you. That was quite an introduction. I'm impressed."
Same words, remembered exactly, heard through two different pairs of ears.
And suddenly Kougaiji realized that Nii was pointing that gun directly at him.
"Stand up," he ordered.
"You can't kill me with that."
"You can't kill me with that."
"I figured as much, but that's not what I'm here
for."
"I figured as much, but I wonder if that's necessarily the case."
Kougaiji stood, tugging out the last of the cables. The floor was freezing.
"Oh yeah?"
Nii stood as well, the pistol still trained directly on the youkai's forehead. "Yes, I'm well aware you're of far too special a breed for a normal gun to cause more than extreme pain. But I have to wonder-- what about the human in there with you?"
"It'd be me taking the hit."
"And both of you registering the pain. Do you realize how susceptible to suggestion the human mind really is? Do you know that if you were to tell it that its arm is missing, the arm itself would cease to feel and function? How would it respond to a bullet directly to its skull?"
Kougaiji made an effort to swallow. "And all in the name of science, am I right?"
"Ten points, highness."
"You humans are sick."
It was the wrong kind of laugh. It wasn't a sardonic, condescending laugh of the superior. It wasn't even insane. It was a genuinely amused laugh, as though Kougaiji had just cracked a great joke at a party.
"You have one in your head," he pointed out, with a little jabbing motion with the gun barrel.
"He agrees with me."
"How good for him."
"You want to kill us? Go ahead. It only delays your death a little longer. How far do you think you can run before the eruption? Actually, you should have already been running."
"You don't scare me, rat."
"That's your fault."
And then the gun was at his forehead, cold circle of metal pressed between his eyes.
"I'll shoot you here," Nii said quietly. "So that when the blood pours out of that poor priest's forehead, it'll take that chakra of his with it."
There was an explosion. That tore through everything.
Kougaiji fell to the floor hard on his knees, head swimming, ears ringing shrilly as though they were about to burst. Red haze in his eyes, the pain that split right through the middle of his forehead, that dared to crack his skull in two--
But there was no blood. As his shaking fingers wrapped around his throbbing head edged forward to feel, there was no wound there, there was not so much as a mark, the gun hadn't gone off at all, so what--?!
Near him, a table fell over and spilled tools and gauze across the steel floor.
The steel floor... cracked.
"AAH!" The throbbing hit again, worse than before, a powerful SURGE through every inch of his body.
Through the pain he saw Nii's bunny-slippered feet stumbling back. As the ground beneath them started to shake.
"What--" the human began.
In his head, Sanzo's voice was broken with static.
It hit again, harder, running through his spine and his ribs and lungs, in time with his heartbeat.
Heartbeat.
His heartbeat.
His father's.
"No!" he tried to scream against the agony in his skull. "No, not yet!"
It was happening too fast.
Kouryuu wasn't going to make it in time.
No NO! NO! This couldn't be--!
A crash overhead, a shower of sparks, as the ceiling above them ripped and shattered. Crumbled stone falling, cascading down onto the manmade florescent lights, onto the wires lacing the air like a web, the machines that whirred and spun. Things toppled and broke and shattered, cables and suspensions snapped.
And somewhere, there was a roar.
Through the haze filling his head Kougaiji pushed himself into a crawl, even as the floor shook and his arms trembled, as the sky fell down around him and things screamed, and his hand touched upon the cold metal of the Smith & Wesson held limply in Nii's grip, as the human lay crumpled on the floor. Breathing. Unconscious. Blood dripping from a gash to his head. But alive.
Kougaiji's hand closed over the gun. He fumbled with unresponding fingers and checked the chamber. Live rounds. Five bullets. Five shots he had to make count.
No, something in his head said. Four shots. And one kept for when all your luck ran out.
Yes.
Struggling, he pulled himself up onto his knees, and slowly climbed to his feet, staggering and holding onto himself as boulder-sized slabs of the castle stone fell not even ten feet to his right. Soft cloth fell from a rack near his feet. Some lab coat, no, paler and touched with dirt and several days' use, the robes that had been taken from him. He threw them on and tucked the front left over right and didn't bother for a sash, just hid the gun into a sleeve and turned his gaze to the room around him. Through the rising fires and dust and the distortion of sick sunlight he saw the door at the far end of the room. And went for it.
Outside in the halls were chaos, strict and pure insanity, people running, people screaming, things tearing apart around them as the beat of the Demon King's heart grew stronger, faster. He saw nothing recognizable, no path he could take that would lead him somewhere he would know, but he still went. Dodging, ducking, running under fallen beams and over fires and past the shouts of guards and terrified servants. Let his feet, bare and torn and cut and singed, lead him where they would, who knew to where.
They were shouting. Everyone was shouting. Cries of the end of the world, of a second siege from the south gate, of the eastern warriors laying a second attack, of the King awakening.
Found a room, and found it locked. Men with swords yelling at him around the corners as they climbed over mounting rubble and the gaps in the floor.
Took the gun in hand. The metal caught the firelight and made it gleam.
He fired.
The lock split. He went forward, pushed his fingers in for purchase between the doors, claws cracking and breaking off and not caring, not caring as he pushed and pulled and pried those doors apart with everything he had. Not even knowing what room he was stepping into. His father's. His mother's. An escape.
His friend's.
Kougaiji had just enough time to see the cables falling from the ceiling as though in slow motion, and the green liquid of the stasis tank pulsing almost white, and the figure within it glowing with a complete ethereal light. Before it all exploded.
The sound itself knocked him back, the shock wave of the contained explosion forcing him back against the shutting doors even before the glass flung out in all directions, slicing through wires and cables and pulleys and beams, sliced the tops of computer consoles and shredded keyboards and dug like shurikens into the wall, cut through Kougaiji's skin even as he shielded his face with his arms, the rip and the tug he struggled against to get near. Viscous fluid, the smell of the dead washed over everything, pooled around his bleeding feet.
The heartbeat in his head was silenced here. In this room. Something, somehow, he could feel it, had put a shield up around this area, held it in a strong protective embrace.
He watched the glow around Sanzo die and fade away, as the priest fell, slowly, floating, bleeding along his arms and legs, the stark red against nearly pure white, pigmentless skin. Float down like a ghost gradually pulled down with the gravity of the earth.
White noise in his ears. The sound of a frequency that it was not sound, it was anti-sound, it cottoned everything and drew Kougaiji closer despite the terror, despite the deep cuts all over his body. His feet stepping into ankle-deep water, dragging the bottom of his robes as he approached, and the body of High Priest Genjo Sanzo finally collapsed to the floor and did not move.
It was a stillness that one felt at the center of a hurricane, that small pocket of calm cut out of a surrounding hell. But it wasn't a peace. It was its own nightmare.
He wasn't breathing.
Kougaiji sank to his knees beside the crumpled figure, could not help but, pulled down by this sudden weight of guilt and despair.
He was too late.
They were too late.
It had happened too fast and they couldn't do anything and outside this shell the storm was raging and the roar lingered in the back of his skull.
All their goddamned planning and this is what they'd been left with.
Shaking, Kougaiji took his hands to his robes and pulled them from his body, left himself in only pants again. Took the robes and covered them over the human's naked form and wished to gods that the material didn't look dark against that stark pale skin. Skin the shade of death itself, ice cold under his fingers.
He drew them to the side of the priest's throat, thought vaguely of that it had been his first desire to wrap his hands around that neck and feel the pulse die from under them. No pulse. Not now.
There was something he was supposed to do now.
There was something that he promised.
The words were gone.
How... how useless he was. How pathetic and pointless and weak he was when it all came down to the end, how he could do nothing, not even the simplest of things to grant his friend in death, could only fall on top of that body with its dying internal heat and wrap arms around unresisting shoulders, bury head against an unmoving back and couldn't even muster the strength for real tears.
Just felt the beat, the erratic unsteady beat of his own heart that pounded in pain, in self-torture. That drifted down and slowed until even that seemed barely to exist, no more than an occasional, metered, dying thump.
Thump.
.
Thump.
.
Thump.
.
Thump.
.
Dth-thump.
.
Dth-thump.
.
Dth-thump.
.
Dth-thump. Dth-thump.
.
Dth-thump. Dth-thump.
.
Dth-thump. Dth-thump. Dth-thump.
.
Kougaiji opened his eyes.
Under his fingers, the bony shoulders he'd clasped started to shake.
And the voice began in his head. At first, just a wordless cry.
And the other side of this link they'd shared, the other part that he had never encountered because there was no sensory input to send him, how he felt the shoulders shake under him but at the same time felt his shoulders shaking and the fingers clasping him with bruising strength, felt the nonword screams in his head of the terrible weight on his back, that even the cloth against his skin was suffocating, pressed down in a strangle of gravity too great to bear.
Don't touch me! Don't touch me!
He started to comply, backing off but keeping those hands where they were, settling back onto his knees and pulling Kouryuu up with him, as he trembled and fidgeted and tried to fight, to jerk away.
DON'T TOUCH ME! GET AWAY! DON'T TOUCH ME!
It's all right. It'll be all right.
DON'T! GET AWAY!
He started to pull himself to his feet. And he felt the tug on shoulders of being pulled up too. Kouryuu's head still bowed, wet and stringy hair obscuring his face.
Don't touch me! Get off me!
Everything's gonna be all right. Everything's gonna be all right. Look at me.
No, get away!
Look at me. It'll be all right. Look at me.
He willed everything into the thought, softly pushing with his mind to get the other to comply, to slowly pull his head up and stare up at him with dead, dull, pale eyes, and at the same time seeing up into dark indigo with the vertical slits wide and irridescent. Smelling the blood on him, on himself, his blood, his own blood. Felt the tug of something in the back of their minds.
The canvas on the far wall that had hidden the hole had fallen down in shreds and now the sun moved out behind the clouds and sent hazy sunlight in, and Kougaiji's eyes contracted to thin slivers and Kouryuu's were still wide and unchanging, or was it Kougaiji's eyes that stayed and Kouryuu's that changed and was there really any difference between them now, with the link at its absolute strongest as it had ever been, with no walls between them now at all, when anything and everything in the world would be possible and it didn't matter when the storm came now because they could do it together and they weren't afraid-- And of them, one moved and his mouth opened to say something and--
Behind them, rubble fell from a trio of hurried footsteps. And a voice.
"SANZO!" Goku shouted.
Sanzo turned.
And in that moment,
the link
broke.
-----