[fic] Balloons 1
May. 30th, 2010 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: Balloons
Rating: none
Pairings: 39, past Sanzo/Koumyou
Genre: AU WAFF
Wordcount: 3k
Warnings: Koumyou is dead. Also, before the pairings squick you out, for the purposes of this fic Koumyou was never Sanzo's father figure. Might contain wacky adventures.
Summary: Sanzo hates the park, Hakkai, Gojyo, people and the world. He likes his OCD and his job as a professional Internet troll. He likes his unapologetic, rampant atheism. The universe sets out to prove him wrong.
Author's Note: Very loosely based on the (awesome and amazing) movie Up! This is actually a “light” version of the bunny – the original explored the pitfalls of reincarnation and crushed your soul.
Author's Note Two: That this will be continued is a done deal. Clearly I have lost the ability to produce one-shots. XD I am not promising speedy updates, as was the case with ST, because there is the possibility I will leave the couple thousand words that follow this chapter for last. I will keep you informed. :D
Betaed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rroselavy and kispexi2, who graciously stepped in to help. <3 Thank you both!
Balloons. The entire sky was filled with goddamned balloons. Fucking parades. As if there was anything to celebrate. Sanzo slammed the crystal clear window shut in a fit of annoyance and stalked to the immaculate kitchen. He dumped the sponge and the window-cleaner in the sink, rinsed the basin, dried it, and put it away. Washing the windows was the final step in his weekly ballet of sanitising the flat; all that remained was returning the cleaning liquids to their cupboards, drying the sink with a cloth, and then he was done.
The result of his efforts was that the place was so sterile you could pour soup directly onto the floor of each of three spacious rooms and lick it clean, without inhaling so much as a microbe. Now, fumes from too many chemicals, that was another matter. They could probably kill an elephant, provided you could get an elephant up two flights of stairs and persuade it to try breathing too close to the spotless floor.
That was the first thing people noticed when they entered the flat, for whatever reason – the cleanliness. Every surface gleamed, the wooden floors were waxed and shining, the curtains could have appeared in any washing powder commercial at a moment’s notice. This was a place where dirt seemed nonexistent.
The second thing people noticed, once they got over the fact that a flat inhabited by an actual person could be this sanitary, was the emptiness.
There was no furniture in any of the rooms, save for a cheap plywood desk and a matching chair and a rolled-up futon at its side, glaringly out of place in the sunny living room, whose walls and doorways were finished with mahogany. Only the kitchen boasted a semblance of a flat furnished to its character and even that was spoiled by the eerie emptiness of the cupboards and the shelves.
Nobody had lived in this flat for years.
Sanzo didn’t particularly enjoy housework. He never had. He devoted a good portion of his days to it, even though he really didn’t have to – he could hire a maid, a fact that Hakkai never failed to bring up whenever he set foot in the flat (all too often, in Sanzo’s opinion) -- but that would have required allowing a stranger inside, and Sanzo had a deadly allergy to people. Hatred, allergy, whichever. He preferred to be left alone, a fact which everybody save for Hakkai had acknowledged, out of respect, indifference to his existence, or fright.
Sanzo aligned the cleaning liquids and closed the cupboard door, then made a beeline for the fridge. These days it contained nothing but beer cans, which was fine by him. Beer contained enough calories to keep a man going for a long time, and a liquid diet had many advantages. Sanzo certainly wasn’t complaining.
Well, that wasn’t true. Sanzo did complain, loudly and with gusto – complaining was the only thing that still inspired a quasi-emotional response in his soul. These days Sanzo did it with the aide of the Internet, another wonder in the world so insanely stupid it had produced, and had the gall to be proud of, democracy. As far as Sanzo was concerned, the optimal solution would be to shoot everybody. Screw all the humanitarian crap. The population as a whole deserved neither mercy nor compassion: every last human being was unworthy of saving, and anyone stupid enough to pity the fool who got himself into trouble, ought to be shot on general principle.
Sanzo returned to his desk, pulled the curtains over the window to block out the natural light, took a long sip of his beer, a longer drag of his cigarette, and typed the phrase out.
“The world,” he continued, “is a craphole run by dickheads who deserve everything that’s coming to them, and no, I am not kidding. Thank the random fluctuations in space-time that some uneducated, naïve dweebs like to call god that global warming will soon burn all of this damned planet to a crisp.”
He leaned back in his chair to admire his work. He despised the Internet as a whole – how could he not, when it was run by morons, for morons – but as Hakkai often pointed out there was very little in this world that he didn’t despise. In fact, he could count the things he awarded with lukewarm approval on the fingers of one hand.
Down on the street a child chirped in delight and Sanzo added a scathing paragraph on how children were a bane to modern societies and Thomas Harris had the right idea how to deal with them.
He read the entry through one more time, deleted the quote that smacked of Mr T and hit “send”. He lit a cigarette, a treat he deserved for yet another flame-war he was certain to inspire, and leaned back in his chair. He didn’t breathe, just let the smoke escape his parted lips, and watched as it curled in the air, floating towards the ceiling in lazy waves.
The sight was entirely too familiar. Somewhere in the vast expanses of the universe there was a counter that measured everyone’s hours, and much of his had been spent watching the smoke from his cigarette and Koumyou’s pipe wafting towards the ceiling. Between the two of them they had had enough careless laziness to spend entire days in bed, smoking themselves into an early grave.
Of course, the worst that had happened to Sanzo was a dry throat.
Sanzo clenched his eyes shut. How the fuck could he still smoke, he asked himself time and again, when the rest of the flat had been scrubbed clean of anything that even remotely hinted at the presence of living human being, now or in the past. He stopped short of hanging tarp at the windows, not because sunlight didn’t make him irritable these days, but because Hakkai had pitched an unholy fit when he saw the living room cast into darkness.
Sanzo had considered changing the locks (this followed the realisation that Hakkai had taken Koumyou’s set of keys and wouldn’t give them back), and he would have, had he never been introduced to Hakkai’s sleazy boyfriend, who viewed lock picking as a harmless hobby. Fucking friends, Sanzo had thought more times than he cared to count, who needed enemies with them around?
The computer pinged at the same time as the phone rang. Sanzo ignored the latter in favour of the former. His fans spent entirely too much time glued to their computers, which was fine by him – their ineffectual attempts at hurling insults in his direction were hilarious and comprised about thirty percent of his enjoyment of life these days. Another sixty was his day job and the remaining ten was tobacco and alcohol.
The phone rang again. Sanzo ignored it.
The phone continued to ring, until Sanzo finally picked up the receiver. “Fuck you,” he said.
“’Fuck you’ isn’t a socially acceptable greeting,” Hakkai said.
“What do you want?”
“I am merely calling to remind you of your weekly outing.”
“No.”
“Don’t you dare hang up!”
Sanzo’s fingers hovered over the disconnect button. “This is pointless,” he said, his voice as close to wheedling as it would ever get.
“It is not. Either you go, or I will drag you. And if you cuff yourself to anything, I will drug you, drag you out in a wheelchair and tell everyone you are a grumpy cripple with a heart of gold who needs a Girl Scout with cookies to melt his icy demeanour.”
Sanzo didn’t even think about calling out the ridiculousness of the threat. Hakkai would do all of it, as advertised, down to the Girl Scout. Once again he had to bow down in respect to the evil the man represented. His own trolling of the Internet seemed like kicking cans to the kerb in comparison to Hakkai’s eating puppies alive.
“What do you want?”
“Same thing I want every week,” Hakkai said cheerfully. Sanzo was beginning to suspect he had the conversation recorded. “I want you out in the park, for an hour.”
“Quarter of an hour.”
“An hour.”
“Half.”
“An hour.”
“Fuck you.”
“Thank you, no. Still an hour.”
“Go to hell.”
“Go to the park.”
Sanzo sighed. Fighting with Hakkai was like fighting with the goddamned rain. “Fine, I’ll go to the goddamned park.”
“Splendid. One hour, remember.”
“Whatever.”
“Gojyo will collect you tomorrow night for a movie and dinner with us, and I expect the fridge to be well-stocked on Sunday. I will cook, but I need groceries, which you will provide.”
“I am going to murder you,” Sanzo said, “in your sleep.”
“It’s been two years, Sanzo,” Hakkai replied, and there was concrete reinforced with steel in his voice, “be grateful I’m this lenient.”
Sanzo threw the receiver down and unplugged the phone. He went to check his email (seven messages – two wannabe trolls, two self-proclaimed kings of sarcasm and three newbies who took the Internet way too seriously), put on his shoes, plugged the phone back in and left the flat before it could ring.
Damn Hakkai.
At least it wasn’t raining. It wasn’t even cloudy. Sanzo was blinded by the over-eager sun, which, through a sequence of events he felt it was impossible to predict, led to a young mother spitting poison at him. How was he supposed to know some mothers were stupid enough not to introduce their children to the words “fornication,” “sodomy” and “baboons” early on in life?
Fortunately, Sanzo lived across the street from a park. This spared him the necessity of walking too far. Today the bench directly opposite his window was taken, and demanding that it was freed looked to be too much of a hassle, so he found himself a cosy spot by a secluded oak tree, hidden from view and the sun. The lazy buzzing of bees overhead was a guarantee no one would approach. Sanzo set an alarm clock for four fifty-seven and closed his eyes. If he dozed, the hour would surely pass much more quickly.
He barely had the time to think about a cigarette, when something disgusting hit his forehead, following the insult with a lungful of foul stench.
“What the fuck!” he yelled, not caring about any underage listeners.
A large, golden-brown dog was sitting before him, with an expression of idiotic glee on its fuzzy face and a tennis ball in its mouth. “You sick fuck,” Sanzo told it, sitting up straighter. “I am going to sue your owner for everything he’s fucking worth, you useless mutt.”
The dog turned its head to look at him, opened its mouth, dropped the ball, then proceeded to lick Sanzo’s face, mindless of the mortal peril it was placing itself and its master in. Its tail never stopped wagging, like it was on speed, or meta amphetamine, or whatever kids took these days to make the passing of time bearable.
Sanzo was going to sue the owner for being an idiot and for cruelty to animals, because what fucking moron would feed an already hyper dog drugs.
Someone called out a single-syllable and the dog barked. Sanzo folded his arms and waited for the owner to come to him, get his canine, and receive news of a future lawsuit in person.
“There you are!” The dog barked, and proceeded to lap up the scratches and petting its owner bestowed upon it. “Did you find the ball?”
“Yes, it found the motherfucking ball, after it found my head. Are you fucking blind, you moron?”
“Yeah.”
Sanzo’s mouth, already open to deliver another insult, closed. “What?”
“Yeah, I’m blind,” said the man. Sanzo blinked. “’S why I wander the park with a creepy harness.” There was indeed a creepy-looking harness in his hand. Sanzo’s brain was still processing. He didn’t look blind. He looked like a healthy twenty-something year old, with hair that matched the shape and size of a mop, and eyes that matched the dog’s fur in colour.
“What?”
“Seriously, are you blind?” the man asked in turn, which Sanzo found mind-boggling. Normally at this stage the exchange of insults would have been well under way, but this moron was laughing.
“Keep the mutt away from me,” Sanzo said gruffly.
“I’m terribly sorry about hitting you. No one’s usually under this tree, what with the bees and all.”
The words “shut up and leave me alone” were on the tip of his tongue, but to Sanzo’s surprise a very civil “my bench was occupied,” emerged instead. He never would have suspected himself of sentimentality, but apparently even he drew the line at yelling at cripples. Suddenly he wished for Hakkai, the supreme emperor of evil, to be there. He would send the visually challenged retard packing.
“You have your own bench? Really?”
“It’s not my bench,” Sanzo said, rolling his eyes. “Idiot.” He watched with growing panic as the man made himself comfortable on the grass, clearly intending to stay awhile. The dog rolled onto its back, exposing its belly to scratches and pats, lapping up the attention like the ADHD beast it was.
“Yeah, you don’t seem like the kinda guy who’d sponsor a bench. I’m Goku. This is Dog.”
“What do you call your children, Boy, Other Boy and Girl?”
“It’s Duug, not Dog, Jesus. Relax a little, wouldja?” Goku, clearly not offended in the slightest, stretched out the leg Dug wasn’t parked on. Sanzo revised his earlier opinion. Goku couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, as no self-respecting adult would leave the house in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and calf-length cargo trousers. He looked ten. “Besides, I didn’t name him, he’s a guide dog.”
“Don’t blame other people for your dog having a stupid name.”
Goku laughed. “Dug was specially bred to be a guide dog, and the family that raised him called him Dug. I only got him this winter.”
Dug sat up suddenly, its eyes fixed to a spot above Sanzo’s head. It growled and leapt, following a grey furry streak of fur across the lawn and to yet another tree.
“What happened?” Goku asked rising to his knees.
“Squirrel.”
“Oh.”
“He must be a lousy guide, if he goes running after every critter,” Sanzo said, cursing himself mentally. Shut up, stop fuelling the conversation, get up and get away, he told himself. Too bad his arse insisted on being too heavy to move.
“It’s playtime, when the harness’ off.” Goku straightened his legs in front of him and leaned back. His fingers came in contact with the slimy ball. “There it is. Sorry about hitting you. I didn’t mean to.”
“For a blind guy you have remarkable accuracy.” Sanzo watched Goku’s face for the slightest hint of this being an elaborate, unnecessary prank, but the way his eyes focused on nothing in particular, even though he did appear to be looking straight at Sanzo, corroborated his story.
“Way to poke fun at a cripple,” Goku said. His lips curled into a pout, even though to Sanzo’s inexpert ear he was laughing. “Hey, is anyone there?”
Sanzo looked in the direction Goku pointed the tennis missile. There was no one but the dog, which was still barking up a tree. “No.”
“Awesome. Dug!” Goku launched the ball high into the air.
The dog turned its head so fast Sanzo could swear he heard its neck snap. Its eyes followed the ball and then it was running across the lawn, like the moron it was. Goku laughed when Dug pounced on him with the ball caught between its jaws. Its tail was wagging so hard its hind legs were doing the polka to keep up.
“What’s your name?” Goku asked, looking directly at Sanzo. His fingers were buried in Dug’s golden fur, and yet the effect of having these bizarre, unseeing eyes fixed at him was so uncanny Sanzo shuddered.
He looked at the grinning, golden canine, up into the human eyes of roughly the same shade, up higher onto the brownish mop of hair, higher still into the sky, as if to ask “why me?” and then back down, to the man’s pink lips and heaving chest.
“Sanzo.”
Goku beamed.
Sanzo smiled, despite himself.
The alarm clock rang.
“What was that?”
“My alarm clock.”
“You take an alarm clock with you to the park?”
“You take an ADHD dog to the park, what’s so different?”
“I take the dog, cuz I’d likely walk into a speeding lorry on my way without him. What’s your excuse?”
“I hate being outside.”
“Oh crap, don’t tell me you’re that weirdo who lives across the street!”
Sanzo said nothing.
“Wow,” Goku said. “You’re a local celebrity, did you know that? I’ve heard some girl tell her kid you’re gonna steal her away if she don’t stop whining.”
“And you’re a local freak-show, can I go now?” Sanzo snapped. Jesus My Face On A Tortilla Christ, what would it take to insult this guy?
“Am I stopping you?”
“How am I to know the dog doesn’t have an attack mode?”
“He’s a guide dog. He’s had training!”
“So have the police. That’s why I don’t go round antagonising them.”
“Meaning what, you cross the road when you see one?”
“What do you know, it speaks human.”
“I’m blind, not stupid.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Dick.”
“Monkey.”
Sanzo was counting on great many things to happen, up to and including a sudden meteor strike, but a burst of laughter was not one of them.
“Monkey, seriously? Are you ten?”
Goku’s fingers deftly snapped on Dug’s harness and almost as if it had a morphine drip built in, the dog’s demeanour changed completely. He straightened out, his eyes focused, his expression, if dogs can be said to have an expression, became serious. Goku got up and Dug took his place at his master’s side, all business. “We gotta go. Are you here often?”
“Sometimes,” Sanzo allowed cautiously.
“Well, I’m here every day, at least once, usually around four. I’ll see you sometime.”
“Considering you’re blind, I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Sanzo muttered to the tree, but again, Goku just laughed.
“Bye, Sanzo!”
Sanzo went home, solemnly vowing never to visit the park again.
THE END. Or Is It? TBC
It is my birthday. Joy to the world!
Hmm... remember the poll I posted awhile ago? The one with plotbunnies? Yeah, me neither. XD It must have never happened.
Rating: none
Pairings: 39, past Sanzo/Koumyou
Genre: AU WAFF
Wordcount: 3k
Warnings: Koumyou is dead. Also, before the pairings squick you out, for the purposes of this fic Koumyou was never Sanzo's father figure. Might contain wacky adventures.
Summary: Sanzo hates the park, Hakkai, Gojyo, people and the world. He likes his OCD and his job as a professional Internet troll. He likes his unapologetic, rampant atheism. The universe sets out to prove him wrong.
Author's Note: Very loosely based on the (awesome and amazing) movie Up! This is actually a “light” version of the bunny – the original explored the pitfalls of reincarnation and crushed your soul.
Author's Note Two: That this will be continued is a done deal. Clearly I have lost the ability to produce one-shots. XD I am not promising speedy updates, as was the case with ST, because there is the possibility I will leave the couple thousand words that follow this chapter for last. I will keep you informed. :D
Betaed by
rroselavy and kispexi2, who graciously stepped in to help. <3 Thank you both!Balloons. The entire sky was filled with goddamned balloons. Fucking parades. As if there was anything to celebrate. Sanzo slammed the crystal clear window shut in a fit of annoyance and stalked to the immaculate kitchen. He dumped the sponge and the window-cleaner in the sink, rinsed the basin, dried it, and put it away. Washing the windows was the final step in his weekly ballet of sanitising the flat; all that remained was returning the cleaning liquids to their cupboards, drying the sink with a cloth, and then he was done.
The result of his efforts was that the place was so sterile you could pour soup directly onto the floor of each of three spacious rooms and lick it clean, without inhaling so much as a microbe. Now, fumes from too many chemicals, that was another matter. They could probably kill an elephant, provided you could get an elephant up two flights of stairs and persuade it to try breathing too close to the spotless floor.
That was the first thing people noticed when they entered the flat, for whatever reason – the cleanliness. Every surface gleamed, the wooden floors were waxed and shining, the curtains could have appeared in any washing powder commercial at a moment’s notice. This was a place where dirt seemed nonexistent.
The second thing people noticed, once they got over the fact that a flat inhabited by an actual person could be this sanitary, was the emptiness.
There was no furniture in any of the rooms, save for a cheap plywood desk and a matching chair and a rolled-up futon at its side, glaringly out of place in the sunny living room, whose walls and doorways were finished with mahogany. Only the kitchen boasted a semblance of a flat furnished to its character and even that was spoiled by the eerie emptiness of the cupboards and the shelves.
Nobody had lived in this flat for years.
Sanzo didn’t particularly enjoy housework. He never had. He devoted a good portion of his days to it, even though he really didn’t have to – he could hire a maid, a fact that Hakkai never failed to bring up whenever he set foot in the flat (all too often, in Sanzo’s opinion) -- but that would have required allowing a stranger inside, and Sanzo had a deadly allergy to people. Hatred, allergy, whichever. He preferred to be left alone, a fact which everybody save for Hakkai had acknowledged, out of respect, indifference to his existence, or fright.
Sanzo aligned the cleaning liquids and closed the cupboard door, then made a beeline for the fridge. These days it contained nothing but beer cans, which was fine by him. Beer contained enough calories to keep a man going for a long time, and a liquid diet had many advantages. Sanzo certainly wasn’t complaining.
Well, that wasn’t true. Sanzo did complain, loudly and with gusto – complaining was the only thing that still inspired a quasi-emotional response in his soul. These days Sanzo did it with the aide of the Internet, another wonder in the world so insanely stupid it had produced, and had the gall to be proud of, democracy. As far as Sanzo was concerned, the optimal solution would be to shoot everybody. Screw all the humanitarian crap. The population as a whole deserved neither mercy nor compassion: every last human being was unworthy of saving, and anyone stupid enough to pity the fool who got himself into trouble, ought to be shot on general principle.
Sanzo returned to his desk, pulled the curtains over the window to block out the natural light, took a long sip of his beer, a longer drag of his cigarette, and typed the phrase out.
“The world,” he continued, “is a craphole run by dickheads who deserve everything that’s coming to them, and no, I am not kidding. Thank the random fluctuations in space-time that some uneducated, naïve dweebs like to call god that global warming will soon burn all of this damned planet to a crisp.”
He leaned back in his chair to admire his work. He despised the Internet as a whole – how could he not, when it was run by morons, for morons – but as Hakkai often pointed out there was very little in this world that he didn’t despise. In fact, he could count the things he awarded with lukewarm approval on the fingers of one hand.
Down on the street a child chirped in delight and Sanzo added a scathing paragraph on how children were a bane to modern societies and Thomas Harris had the right idea how to deal with them.
He read the entry through one more time, deleted the quote that smacked of Mr T and hit “send”. He lit a cigarette, a treat he deserved for yet another flame-war he was certain to inspire, and leaned back in his chair. He didn’t breathe, just let the smoke escape his parted lips, and watched as it curled in the air, floating towards the ceiling in lazy waves.
The sight was entirely too familiar. Somewhere in the vast expanses of the universe there was a counter that measured everyone’s hours, and much of his had been spent watching the smoke from his cigarette and Koumyou’s pipe wafting towards the ceiling. Between the two of them they had had enough careless laziness to spend entire days in bed, smoking themselves into an early grave.
Of course, the worst that had happened to Sanzo was a dry throat.
Sanzo clenched his eyes shut. How the fuck could he still smoke, he asked himself time and again, when the rest of the flat had been scrubbed clean of anything that even remotely hinted at the presence of living human being, now or in the past. He stopped short of hanging tarp at the windows, not because sunlight didn’t make him irritable these days, but because Hakkai had pitched an unholy fit when he saw the living room cast into darkness.
Sanzo had considered changing the locks (this followed the realisation that Hakkai had taken Koumyou’s set of keys and wouldn’t give them back), and he would have, had he never been introduced to Hakkai’s sleazy boyfriend, who viewed lock picking as a harmless hobby. Fucking friends, Sanzo had thought more times than he cared to count, who needed enemies with them around?
The computer pinged at the same time as the phone rang. Sanzo ignored the latter in favour of the former. His fans spent entirely too much time glued to their computers, which was fine by him – their ineffectual attempts at hurling insults in his direction were hilarious and comprised about thirty percent of his enjoyment of life these days. Another sixty was his day job and the remaining ten was tobacco and alcohol.
The phone rang again. Sanzo ignored it.
The phone continued to ring, until Sanzo finally picked up the receiver. “Fuck you,” he said.
“’Fuck you’ isn’t a socially acceptable greeting,” Hakkai said.
“What do you want?”
“I am merely calling to remind you of your weekly outing.”
“No.”
“Don’t you dare hang up!”
Sanzo’s fingers hovered over the disconnect button. “This is pointless,” he said, his voice as close to wheedling as it would ever get.
“It is not. Either you go, or I will drag you. And if you cuff yourself to anything, I will drug you, drag you out in a wheelchair and tell everyone you are a grumpy cripple with a heart of gold who needs a Girl Scout with cookies to melt his icy demeanour.”
Sanzo didn’t even think about calling out the ridiculousness of the threat. Hakkai would do all of it, as advertised, down to the Girl Scout. Once again he had to bow down in respect to the evil the man represented. His own trolling of the Internet seemed like kicking cans to the kerb in comparison to Hakkai’s eating puppies alive.
“What do you want?”
“Same thing I want every week,” Hakkai said cheerfully. Sanzo was beginning to suspect he had the conversation recorded. “I want you out in the park, for an hour.”
“Quarter of an hour.”
“An hour.”
“Half.”
“An hour.”
“Fuck you.”
“Thank you, no. Still an hour.”
“Go to hell.”
“Go to the park.”
Sanzo sighed. Fighting with Hakkai was like fighting with the goddamned rain. “Fine, I’ll go to the goddamned park.”
“Splendid. One hour, remember.”
“Whatever.”
“Gojyo will collect you tomorrow night for a movie and dinner with us, and I expect the fridge to be well-stocked on Sunday. I will cook, but I need groceries, which you will provide.”
“I am going to murder you,” Sanzo said, “in your sleep.”
“It’s been two years, Sanzo,” Hakkai replied, and there was concrete reinforced with steel in his voice, “be grateful I’m this lenient.”
Sanzo threw the receiver down and unplugged the phone. He went to check his email (seven messages – two wannabe trolls, two self-proclaimed kings of sarcasm and three newbies who took the Internet way too seriously), put on his shoes, plugged the phone back in and left the flat before it could ring.
Damn Hakkai.
At least it wasn’t raining. It wasn’t even cloudy. Sanzo was blinded by the over-eager sun, which, through a sequence of events he felt it was impossible to predict, led to a young mother spitting poison at him. How was he supposed to know some mothers were stupid enough not to introduce their children to the words “fornication,” “sodomy” and “baboons” early on in life?
Fortunately, Sanzo lived across the street from a park. This spared him the necessity of walking too far. Today the bench directly opposite his window was taken, and demanding that it was freed looked to be too much of a hassle, so he found himself a cosy spot by a secluded oak tree, hidden from view and the sun. The lazy buzzing of bees overhead was a guarantee no one would approach. Sanzo set an alarm clock for four fifty-seven and closed his eyes. If he dozed, the hour would surely pass much more quickly.
He barely had the time to think about a cigarette, when something disgusting hit his forehead, following the insult with a lungful of foul stench.
“What the fuck!” he yelled, not caring about any underage listeners.
A large, golden-brown dog was sitting before him, with an expression of idiotic glee on its fuzzy face and a tennis ball in its mouth. “You sick fuck,” Sanzo told it, sitting up straighter. “I am going to sue your owner for everything he’s fucking worth, you useless mutt.”
The dog turned its head to look at him, opened its mouth, dropped the ball, then proceeded to lick Sanzo’s face, mindless of the mortal peril it was placing itself and its master in. Its tail never stopped wagging, like it was on speed, or meta amphetamine, or whatever kids took these days to make the passing of time bearable.
Sanzo was going to sue the owner for being an idiot and for cruelty to animals, because what fucking moron would feed an already hyper dog drugs.
Someone called out a single-syllable and the dog barked. Sanzo folded his arms and waited for the owner to come to him, get his canine, and receive news of a future lawsuit in person.
“There you are!” The dog barked, and proceeded to lap up the scratches and petting its owner bestowed upon it. “Did you find the ball?”
“Yes, it found the motherfucking ball, after it found my head. Are you fucking blind, you moron?”
“Yeah.”
Sanzo’s mouth, already open to deliver another insult, closed. “What?”
“Yeah, I’m blind,” said the man. Sanzo blinked. “’S why I wander the park with a creepy harness.” There was indeed a creepy-looking harness in his hand. Sanzo’s brain was still processing. He didn’t look blind. He looked like a healthy twenty-something year old, with hair that matched the shape and size of a mop, and eyes that matched the dog’s fur in colour.
“What?”
“Seriously, are you blind?” the man asked in turn, which Sanzo found mind-boggling. Normally at this stage the exchange of insults would have been well under way, but this moron was laughing.
“Keep the mutt away from me,” Sanzo said gruffly.
“I’m terribly sorry about hitting you. No one’s usually under this tree, what with the bees and all.”
The words “shut up and leave me alone” were on the tip of his tongue, but to Sanzo’s surprise a very civil “my bench was occupied,” emerged instead. He never would have suspected himself of sentimentality, but apparently even he drew the line at yelling at cripples. Suddenly he wished for Hakkai, the supreme emperor of evil, to be there. He would send the visually challenged retard packing.
“You have your own bench? Really?”
“It’s not my bench,” Sanzo said, rolling his eyes. “Idiot.” He watched with growing panic as the man made himself comfortable on the grass, clearly intending to stay awhile. The dog rolled onto its back, exposing its belly to scratches and pats, lapping up the attention like the ADHD beast it was.
“Yeah, you don’t seem like the kinda guy who’d sponsor a bench. I’m Goku. This is Dog.”
“What do you call your children, Boy, Other Boy and Girl?”
“It’s Duug, not Dog, Jesus. Relax a little, wouldja?” Goku, clearly not offended in the slightest, stretched out the leg Dug wasn’t parked on. Sanzo revised his earlier opinion. Goku couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, as no self-respecting adult would leave the house in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and calf-length cargo trousers. He looked ten. “Besides, I didn’t name him, he’s a guide dog.”
“Don’t blame other people for your dog having a stupid name.”
Goku laughed. “Dug was specially bred to be a guide dog, and the family that raised him called him Dug. I only got him this winter.”
Dug sat up suddenly, its eyes fixed to a spot above Sanzo’s head. It growled and leapt, following a grey furry streak of fur across the lawn and to yet another tree.
“What happened?” Goku asked rising to his knees.
“Squirrel.”
“Oh.”
“He must be a lousy guide, if he goes running after every critter,” Sanzo said, cursing himself mentally. Shut up, stop fuelling the conversation, get up and get away, he told himself. Too bad his arse insisted on being too heavy to move.
“It’s playtime, when the harness’ off.” Goku straightened his legs in front of him and leaned back. His fingers came in contact with the slimy ball. “There it is. Sorry about hitting you. I didn’t mean to.”
“For a blind guy you have remarkable accuracy.” Sanzo watched Goku’s face for the slightest hint of this being an elaborate, unnecessary prank, but the way his eyes focused on nothing in particular, even though he did appear to be looking straight at Sanzo, corroborated his story.
“Way to poke fun at a cripple,” Goku said. His lips curled into a pout, even though to Sanzo’s inexpert ear he was laughing. “Hey, is anyone there?”
Sanzo looked in the direction Goku pointed the tennis missile. There was no one but the dog, which was still barking up a tree. “No.”
“Awesome. Dug!” Goku launched the ball high into the air.
The dog turned its head so fast Sanzo could swear he heard its neck snap. Its eyes followed the ball and then it was running across the lawn, like the moron it was. Goku laughed when Dug pounced on him with the ball caught between its jaws. Its tail was wagging so hard its hind legs were doing the polka to keep up.
“What’s your name?” Goku asked, looking directly at Sanzo. His fingers were buried in Dug’s golden fur, and yet the effect of having these bizarre, unseeing eyes fixed at him was so uncanny Sanzo shuddered.
He looked at the grinning, golden canine, up into the human eyes of roughly the same shade, up higher onto the brownish mop of hair, higher still into the sky, as if to ask “why me?” and then back down, to the man’s pink lips and heaving chest.
“Sanzo.”
Goku beamed.
Sanzo smiled, despite himself.
The alarm clock rang.
“What was that?”
“My alarm clock.”
“You take an alarm clock with you to the park?”
“You take an ADHD dog to the park, what’s so different?”
“I take the dog, cuz I’d likely walk into a speeding lorry on my way without him. What’s your excuse?”
“I hate being outside.”
“Oh crap, don’t tell me you’re that weirdo who lives across the street!”
Sanzo said nothing.
“Wow,” Goku said. “You’re a local celebrity, did you know that? I’ve heard some girl tell her kid you’re gonna steal her away if she don’t stop whining.”
“And you’re a local freak-show, can I go now?” Sanzo snapped. Jesus My Face On A Tortilla Christ, what would it take to insult this guy?
“Am I stopping you?”
“How am I to know the dog doesn’t have an attack mode?”
“He’s a guide dog. He’s had training!”
“So have the police. That’s why I don’t go round antagonising them.”
“Meaning what, you cross the road when you see one?”
“What do you know, it speaks human.”
“I’m blind, not stupid.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Dick.”
“Monkey.”
Sanzo was counting on great many things to happen, up to and including a sudden meteor strike, but a burst of laughter was not one of them.
“Monkey, seriously? Are you ten?”
Goku’s fingers deftly snapped on Dug’s harness and almost as if it had a morphine drip built in, the dog’s demeanour changed completely. He straightened out, his eyes focused, his expression, if dogs can be said to have an expression, became serious. Goku got up and Dug took his place at his master’s side, all business. “We gotta go. Are you here often?”
“Sometimes,” Sanzo allowed cautiously.
“Well, I’m here every day, at least once, usually around four. I’ll see you sometime.”
“Considering you’re blind, I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Sanzo muttered to the tree, but again, Goku just laughed.
“Bye, Sanzo!”
Sanzo went home, solemnly vowing never to visit the park again.
It is my birthday. Joy to the world!
Hmm... remember the poll I posted awhile ago? The one with plotbunnies? Yeah, me neither. XD It must have never happened.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-05-30 01:45 am (UTC)Was Dug's Hakkuryuu?
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Date: 2010-05-30 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 12:17 pm (UTC)No, this is Dug (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy-CBs0XNlM). Hakuryuu may make a cameo later. If I continue. Possibly. XD
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Date: 2010-05-30 03:21 am (UTC)May this special day be bursting with goodness & joy!!!
And thank you for gifting us with a fic on your own birthday.^^
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Date: 2010-05-30 06:05 am (UTC)Fave line : “What would you call your children, boy, other boy and girl?” LOL!!!!
Please say you'll continue. Better still, make it as long as Simple Things!! Muahahahahaha!!!
Can't blame me for hoping, ya know? ;)
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Date: 2010-05-30 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 12:18 pm (UTC)No problem. :) Birthdays are for happiness, all around!
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Date: 2010-05-30 07:21 pm (UTC)And I love this. :3 Lots and lots. Goku is like a bubble of happy, even when blind. XD
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Date: 2010-05-30 07:49 pm (UTC)Goku is an absolute bubble of happy, something which Sanzo is in desperate need of. :>
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Date: 2010-05-31 02:47 pm (UTC)And Happy birthday, though I'm properly late >,< - sorry xD
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Date: 2010-05-31 07:07 pm (UTC)Thank you all the same. :>
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Date: 2010-05-31 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 05:13 am (UTC)I love the set-up so far and as usual your characterizations delight me to no end. Looking forward to more.
Happy belated birthday!
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Date: 2010-06-02 08:10 pm (UTC)I'm well on my way to writing more. So far it's hilarious! And also heartwarming, so yay!
Thank you. :>
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Date: 2010-06-04 03:32 pm (UTC)I love your way of setting up the characters, and the plot you manage to come up are most unique-- Like the 'companionship' in 'Fireflies and Silk,' Goku's well-mannered despite his social status XDD And your 'Ain't coming back' is absolutely awesome, I just love how you describe Captain!Sanzo and West's crew's daily interaction, and throwing Kougaiji Tachi into the mix! XD Then Hakkai and Goku intrude their peaceful life and spice things up~ Not to mention that 'Simple Things' is one hell of a masterpiece!
I really appreciate how you always manage to give Goku more of his mellow, ageless personality while not losing his childish innocence~~ Good luck with the next chapter of 'Balloons' ^O^
-Chibi chimi chan
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Date: 2010-06-05 05:51 pm (UTC)I am a huge fan of AUs and so I often fuse the shows/movies I love with these wonderful characters Minekura created, and the results often overwhelm my imagination.
Goku is easily my favourite character, and so while characterisation could always be debated, I like to think I have a good grasp on the core of their personalities, and can therefore put them in any which world. I hope you enjoy the ride Balloons will shortly become! <3
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Date: 2010-11-15 02:08 am (UTC)