The good, the bad, the nutty.
Mar. 8th, 2007 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keDaaaamn. I really hate my sleeping patterns. I fail at sleeping.
Thank heavens for Em! Wheeeee, Supernatural season two!
In other news, essay went... weird. I suppose it happens, when you get a handful of words to explain a concept as broad as the blueness of the sky. Here's hoping.
More exciting news,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kispexi2_2 wrote a fun-tastic Saiyuki/Firefly crossover. Seriously. Sanzo and Mal on one ship. And she does the Firefly 'verse so awesomely, you know you want to check it out. Because, well, "too gorram pretty to die" says it all.
Since she said it was supposed to be a one-shot, I of course went and did this:
They would totally own the 'verse, if it occured to them for five minutes.
It took a little longer than the esteemed captain would have liked, but eventually Goku showed up in the cargo hold, still rubbing his eyes. Hakkai was shadowing the kid, his gaze decidedly flat. Sanzo barely looked at them. He undid his belt and handed it to Kougaji, complete with holster and gun, who took it with an expression that hovered in-between understanding and the desire not to.
“What are you playing at, captain?” Hakkai asked, his brows furrowed. Sanzo ignored him and moved to stand in front of Goku, who was steadfastly refusing to look up.
“Goku,” the captain said. “Hit me.” Well, that fixed the no-looking-up problem right away.
“What?” Goku’s eyes widened. His weren’t the only ones that did.
“Sanzo, what the fuck!”
“You heard me. Now.”
“No.”
“Goku.”
“No.” He was shaking his head vehemently, backing away.
“Hakkai.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need to know how big a mistake I’m making by letting him keep breathing my air.” He turned back to Goku. “Hit me, monkey. Now.”
“I won’t!” Sanzo’s eyes narrowed. Goku was backing away like a frightened child, his arms curled across his chest. Again with the mixed signals. His face was displaying obvious fright, the rest of him, well. Gojyo was the resident body language expert, but Sanzo knew confidence when he saw it. In this case, however, spotting it would require someone like Gojyo, who made obscene amounts of money by leering at women in a manner appropriate for their status and comfort levels, or Sanzo, who was expected to judge how much of a fight any given person would put up before he started hitting them. And, of course, that particular manner of folding one’s arms across their chest was quite plainly a fighting stance waiting to happen.
For the umpteenth time that evening Sanzo thought they were very much doomed.
“Go…” he started saying, but didn’t get to finish.
“You’re going about this wrong,” Jien said. He walked over to Goku and, without bothering with hints or any such niceties, threw a punch at him. Goku started falling, not unexpectedly after one of Jien’s punches, except the falling lasted for a fraction of a second, because before anyone could even shout out a general warning his left hand shot out and caught the floor. Goku rotated his body around that hand and landed safely on his feet. Jien’s eyes narrowed as he followed through with his idea of checking for mistakes, throwing another punch at the kid.
It never landed. Goku intercepted his fist and delivered a quick kick to his midsection, sending the man sprawling onto the floor. He looked at Sanzo, whose immediate reaction was “Oh, shit.” Goku’s face was completely devoid of feeling, yet again. Sanzo found he couldn’t move, whether because of terror or sheer denial.
That expression did not belong anywhere near that face.
“Sanzo!” Kougaji rushed forward. He swung his arm at the kid, only to have it caught and held, while the rest of him went sailing in an effortless arch feet over head and to the floor.
Sanzo’s gun fell to the floor.
“Fuck!” Sanzo dove for it, but a powerful kick caught him on the ribs and sent him hurtling into the corner. Goku cocked his head to the side and looked at the gun lying on the floor before him. Slowly, like he was taming a wilder beast, he kneeled and removed the weapon from the leather holster.
Several meters and untold cerebral dimensions away, Sanzo gritted his teeth and internally cursed his protesting ribcage. Nothing seemed to be broken, thank the fucking Buddha and his minions for small mercies. With some effort he hefted himself to his knees.
He was spending way too much time on his knees today, he reflected grimly. And he wasn’t even Christian.
Goku might as well be, kneeling as he was and holding the gun in his palms like it was a holy relic. Sanzo watched him warily. If the idiot started shooting, they were fucked. He’d had a minute to himself to think back and examine the fight in the hold. Goku with a gun was not just bad news, it was damn near the one-way highway to the afterlife. Pedal to the metal, duty booth, please cash in your karma, better luck in the next life. At the moment the safety was still on, so maybe he could get to another gun before a bullet from his did some actual damage. Goku seemed preoccupied with weighing the weapon, but that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Within a blink of an eye his grip on the handle tightened, the other hand undoing the safety. Sanzo’s mouth opened on its own accord.
“Stop it right now, you moron!” he screamed.
Goku jerked sharply, as if bitten, but the trigger didn’t move a bit. Commendable control over involuntarily spasms, bonus points to the host of Dr Frankensteins responsible. Sanzo wondered briefly whether he should be relieved or disappointed. The muzzle was pointed squarely at Goku’s sternoclavicular joint. It would have ended a lot of their trouble, and ended it quick, if messily.
“Goku,” Sanzo said, his voice much lower this time. “Put the gun down.” Goku gave no outward sign of having heard, but after a few very tense seconds he released the white-knuckled grip on the pistol and let it fall to the floor. He took a couple of shuddering breaths and pressed his palms against his face. Sanzo moved forward cautiously, snatching the gun from the floor and re-holstering it. He was so close he could feel the heat the kid radiated, even though he made no move to touch him in any way.
“Kou?” he asked, keeping an eye on their unpredictable passenger. “Jien?”
“I’m good,” they both replied in turn. Despite the pained grunts that accompanied their words, they sounded like they were. Sanzo nodded at his second briefly and returned his attention to Goku.
Shit, he thought to himself, I thought I have issues, but the kid’s obviously a walking encyclopaedia of fucked up.
“Goku?” he ventured, keeping one hand on the gun. Goku’s shoulders were trembling. Sanzo looked around, hoping for some inspiration from his crew, or the fuck-up of a doctor who brought this mess unto their unsuspecting heads. “Hakkai – what do we do with him?”
“Do with him?” The doctor sounded genuinely puzzled. “Captain, at the moment you seem to know more about keeping him in check than the people who made him.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Hakkai’s empty smile seemed to be taken straight out of a grisly fairy tale. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that he reacted to a direct command.”
At that, Goku let out a strangled half-sob and jumped to his feet. Before anyone could say a word, he was grasping the edge of the walkway above his head and flipping himself over the railing. Not a small feat, considering that the catwalk was three meters above the floor.
Sanzo just closed his eyes. “Find him,” he said tiredly to no one in particular. He so wasn’t in a mood to deal with any more shit today.
xxx.XXX.xxx
Locating Goku proved to be incredibly simple, Sanzo found. All it took was getting back to his own cabin, in hopes of collapsing on his bed to erase the day from his mind. That strategy had always served him well. Always, discounting the present, obviously. He really shouldn’t have been surprised that, when the door opened, there was Goku, lo and behold, curled on a floor, knees against his chest. His wide eyes were trained on Sanzo, unblinking, as if he was expecting the man to appear in the door.
Fuck it all to hell, the captain thought tiredly, I can’t deal with it.
“Goku,” he said quietly, not moving from the doorway. The softness of his voice surprised him. He was certain his vocal cords didn’t operate on such frequencies. “I need to know you won’t start killing us. What you did back there, with the SOs – I can’t fight that. Kou can’t, Jien can’t, certainly not Yaone or Lirin.”
“I don’t know,” Goku whispered.
“Know what?”
“I don’t know what I did. I never know what I’m doing. Everything just goes foggy, and then I wake up and I lost a day, an hour, and I don’t know what happened, there’s blood on me and they don’t tell me anything.”
Sanzo cast a look to the corridor. It was empty. He sighed to himself. His merry band of morons would think to check in his cabin, eventually. Maybe they’ll discover his rotting corpse, by the time the thought would cross their minds. At least way they’d know to shoot before asking questions. Decision made, he palmed the control pad and the door slid shut behind his back. Couple more clicks, and the red light pronounced to the world that this doorway was locked and the owner would rather it stayed that way.
“I remember stuff,” Goku continued, ignoring the mini drama happening by the entrance. “I hear screaming. Everyone is always screaming. I would look and there’s quiet, than I’m moving, but I don’t know I’m moving, cause I’m trying to stay still, and I hurt them and they start screaming and then they stop, and it’s quiet again. Different quiet. Bad quiet. Empty, cold, horrible! But that’s all I see, there’s me, and I look at them, and I know where to hit so that they start screaming and I just want them to stop, but can’t, cause my body is just moving and I’m killing them, I’m hurting them and they never stop screaming! Even when they’re dead, and they’re silent, they never stop screaming in my head.” He paused. Sanzo stood frozen, leaning against the closed door. Goku took a shuddering breath. His voice was breaking, but his eyes were dry as they stared into Sanzo’s, unwavering, the whole time. “I saw you. I had guns in my hands, Thunderbolt .45, limited special series, serial numbers five-five-dash-seventeen-five-twelve-three and five-five-dash-seventeen-five-twelve-seven, manufactured on Hephaestus, ten shot, semi-automatic. I held them and I saw you and I was gonna shoot, I was gonna kill you and you were already screaming, and I just wanted to make it stop!”
“I wasn’t screaming, monkey.”
“You were hurt.”
“Yeah, one of the fuckers hit me on the head. I’ve had worse.”
“I didn’t want you to scream anymore. Not you.”
This was slowly turning out to be the most surreal night of Sanzo’s life, the several hours of experimentation with hallucinogenic substances in a strobe light happy discotheque included.
“I can handle myself,” he said, his voice rough in comparison to the softness of the last few minutes.
“I don’t want you to scream.”
Sanzo made an effort, something he couldn’t remember ever doing before, and pushed himself away from the door. He crossed the tiny space slowly, hesitating at each step. He was not prepared to deal with emotional breakdowns, in any way, shape or form, unless he was the one having them, in which case a night of drinking, fighting (substitute or add sex) did the job.
Except, he had to do something, because if the stupid monkey went off the deep end, they were all screwed, royally.
He really hated the broken voice and empty expression Goku wore.
Cautiously, Sanzo slid to the floor next to the kid. There he was, Mr Don’t Touch Me, Or Find Your Hand In A Gutter, with nary a clue how to go about fixing things, sitting so close to the little killing machine he could feel him breathe.
“I like your ship,” Goku said eventually. “It’s warm. Everyone is warm and alive. Even Hakkai. He was always just like the rest of them, cold and empty like he was dead, but here everything is different. And Kouryuu. I’ve never seen a real cat. I’ve seen pictures and videos, how they are built, how the muscles work, but never a real cat. I didn’t know anything could be so…” his brows furrowed briefly. “I don’t know what to call it. His fur is soft, and so delicate, and I can feel him breathe all over, and he’s alive.
“And then there’s you.”
“Me?” Sanzo asked, the soft admission shaking him out of the numbness. A hairball on legs, found in a back alley of some rundown urban planet, and Goku made it sound like it was the most brilliant thing he’d ever seen in his life. Not to mention the rather unexpected conclusion. “What about me?”
“You’re hot.”
Right. He probably shouldn’t have been as stunned as he was, it wasn’t like never heard such remarks. He was attractive, he knew. A little too attractive, in his opinion, he could do with a little less attention. Especially since his allure was fairly androgynous, and got him all kinds of attention, most of it unwelcome. Coming from a kid who struggled to come up with the word “fluffy”, it was unexpected, to say the least.
“You’re almost glowing with heat, it’s amazing. I haven’t met anyone who’d be as charged. The people in that white place, some of them were pretty intense, but nowhere near as much as you. None was nowhere near as bright. You’re like the sun.”
Sanzo definitely wasn’t going to blush. He’d been sharing living space with a flamboyant whore for going on a year now, he was as far from virginal as humanly possible, there was no way in hell a psychiatrically challenged kid was going to make him blush.
“You haven’t actually talked much to actual people, have you,” Sanzo said, turning away. Honestly, as if the wide-eyed look of complete adoration wasn’t bad enough. “Idiot.”
“I’m not!”
Sanzo risked a glance. Goku was sticking his bottom lip out. That was not an image he needed at the moment.
“I’m not stupid,” Goku said again.
“No, suppose not.” Stupid people don’t calculate the trajectories of bullets fast enough not to be in their way. Still, the kid failed at social interactions. Then again, an annoying voice in the back of his mind piped up, so did he, according to Kougaji. And Yaone. And Jien. Gojyo, possibly, he didn’t care enough to ask. The redhead had way too many reasons to start talking to him already. So Goku thought he was the best thing since cherry bake wells, discovered roughly two days ago. His head was still no more coherent than the contents of a frying pan, which wasn’t really a compliment to anyone involved.
And alright, the kid was obviously past adolescence and the process had been kind to him. More than kind, Sanzo conceded mentally, thinking back to the mystery crate. Generous even, discounting the army of mad scientists trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place. But he was still completely-
“I’ve killed ninety three people,” Goku said, his tone completely matter-of-fact, “The seven in the hold included. I know how to rig an explosive to a vehicle so that it doesn’t kill the people inside, but will tear them to pieces. I know how to drive a person insane with pain without leaving a mark on them. I know how to hit someone to kill, how to cripple, or just knock out.
“First person I killed was a soldier. Young, maybe twenty five. They brought him and two others in for training. Mine, not theirs. They wanted to see what I could do. They gave me a knife, gave them knives, and made me kill them all. I was twelve. I’m sitting here now and I’m thinking there’s no way I can hurt someone, no way I could ever hurt you. I’d rather die than hurt you. But I also know that I can and I would. I did. Just now. I have no idea what happened. Jien hit me and it all went blank and I can’t remember a thing! It scared me. I didn’t want it to happen again, never again.”
-innocent.
Sanzo took a deep breath. There was fury coiling in the pit of his stomach, like nothing he’d ever felt before.
“I am making a mistake, letting you live.” There was silence. “They won’t get you back. Even if I have to put a bullet in your head so that they don’t.”
Goku stared at him for a minute. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
He didn’t say anything more. When Sanzo checked a few minutes later he was asleep, breathing softly. His compact body was curled into a little ball, warm cheek resting against Sanzo’s shoulder, soft hair tickling his neck.
Definitely not fitting the mental image of a deadly weapon.
Thank heavens for Em! Wheeeee, Supernatural season two!
In other news, essay went... weird. I suppose it happens, when you get a handful of words to explain a concept as broad as the blueness of the sky. Here's hoping.
More exciting news,
kispexi2_2 wrote a fun-tastic Saiyuki/Firefly crossover. Seriously. Sanzo and Mal on one ship. And she does the Firefly 'verse so awesomely, you know you want to check it out. Because, well, "too gorram pretty to die" says it all.Since she said it was supposed to be a one-shot, I of course went and did this:
They would totally own the 'verse, if it occured to them for five minutes.
It took a little longer than the esteemed captain would have liked, but eventually Goku showed up in the cargo hold, still rubbing his eyes. Hakkai was shadowing the kid, his gaze decidedly flat. Sanzo barely looked at them. He undid his belt and handed it to Kougaji, complete with holster and gun, who took it with an expression that hovered in-between understanding and the desire not to.
“What are you playing at, captain?” Hakkai asked, his brows furrowed. Sanzo ignored him and moved to stand in front of Goku, who was steadfastly refusing to look up.
“Goku,” the captain said. “Hit me.” Well, that fixed the no-looking-up problem right away.
“What?” Goku’s eyes widened. His weren’t the only ones that did.
“Sanzo, what the fuck!”
“You heard me. Now.”
“No.”
“Goku.”
“No.” He was shaking his head vehemently, backing away.
“Hakkai.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need to know how big a mistake I’m making by letting him keep breathing my air.” He turned back to Goku. “Hit me, monkey. Now.”
“I won’t!” Sanzo’s eyes narrowed. Goku was backing away like a frightened child, his arms curled across his chest. Again with the mixed signals. His face was displaying obvious fright, the rest of him, well. Gojyo was the resident body language expert, but Sanzo knew confidence when he saw it. In this case, however, spotting it would require someone like Gojyo, who made obscene amounts of money by leering at women in a manner appropriate for their status and comfort levels, or Sanzo, who was expected to judge how much of a fight any given person would put up before he started hitting them. And, of course, that particular manner of folding one’s arms across their chest was quite plainly a fighting stance waiting to happen.
For the umpteenth time that evening Sanzo thought they were very much doomed.
“Go…” he started saying, but didn’t get to finish.
“You’re going about this wrong,” Jien said. He walked over to Goku and, without bothering with hints or any such niceties, threw a punch at him. Goku started falling, not unexpectedly after one of Jien’s punches, except the falling lasted for a fraction of a second, because before anyone could even shout out a general warning his left hand shot out and caught the floor. Goku rotated his body around that hand and landed safely on his feet. Jien’s eyes narrowed as he followed through with his idea of checking for mistakes, throwing another punch at the kid.
It never landed. Goku intercepted his fist and delivered a quick kick to his midsection, sending the man sprawling onto the floor. He looked at Sanzo, whose immediate reaction was “Oh, shit.” Goku’s face was completely devoid of feeling, yet again. Sanzo found he couldn’t move, whether because of terror or sheer denial.
That expression did not belong anywhere near that face.
“Sanzo!” Kougaji rushed forward. He swung his arm at the kid, only to have it caught and held, while the rest of him went sailing in an effortless arch feet over head and to the floor.
Sanzo’s gun fell to the floor.
“Fuck!” Sanzo dove for it, but a powerful kick caught him on the ribs and sent him hurtling into the corner. Goku cocked his head to the side and looked at the gun lying on the floor before him. Slowly, like he was taming a wilder beast, he kneeled and removed the weapon from the leather holster.
Several meters and untold cerebral dimensions away, Sanzo gritted his teeth and internally cursed his protesting ribcage. Nothing seemed to be broken, thank the fucking Buddha and his minions for small mercies. With some effort he hefted himself to his knees.
He was spending way too much time on his knees today, he reflected grimly. And he wasn’t even Christian.
Goku might as well be, kneeling as he was and holding the gun in his palms like it was a holy relic. Sanzo watched him warily. If the idiot started shooting, they were fucked. He’d had a minute to himself to think back and examine the fight in the hold. Goku with a gun was not just bad news, it was damn near the one-way highway to the afterlife. Pedal to the metal, duty booth, please cash in your karma, better luck in the next life. At the moment the safety was still on, so maybe he could get to another gun before a bullet from his did some actual damage. Goku seemed preoccupied with weighing the weapon, but that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Within a blink of an eye his grip on the handle tightened, the other hand undoing the safety. Sanzo’s mouth opened on its own accord.
“Stop it right now, you moron!” he screamed.
Goku jerked sharply, as if bitten, but the trigger didn’t move a bit. Commendable control over involuntarily spasms, bonus points to the host of Dr Frankensteins responsible. Sanzo wondered briefly whether he should be relieved or disappointed. The muzzle was pointed squarely at Goku’s sternoclavicular joint. It would have ended a lot of their trouble, and ended it quick, if messily.
“Goku,” Sanzo said, his voice much lower this time. “Put the gun down.” Goku gave no outward sign of having heard, but after a few very tense seconds he released the white-knuckled grip on the pistol and let it fall to the floor. He took a couple of shuddering breaths and pressed his palms against his face. Sanzo moved forward cautiously, snatching the gun from the floor and re-holstering it. He was so close he could feel the heat the kid radiated, even though he made no move to touch him in any way.
“Kou?” he asked, keeping an eye on their unpredictable passenger. “Jien?”
“I’m good,” they both replied in turn. Despite the pained grunts that accompanied their words, they sounded like they were. Sanzo nodded at his second briefly and returned his attention to Goku.
Shit, he thought to himself, I thought I have issues, but the kid’s obviously a walking encyclopaedia of fucked up.
“Goku?” he ventured, keeping one hand on the gun. Goku’s shoulders were trembling. Sanzo looked around, hoping for some inspiration from his crew, or the fuck-up of a doctor who brought this mess unto their unsuspecting heads. “Hakkai – what do we do with him?”
“Do with him?” The doctor sounded genuinely puzzled. “Captain, at the moment you seem to know more about keeping him in check than the people who made him.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Hakkai’s empty smile seemed to be taken straight out of a grisly fairy tale. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that he reacted to a direct command.”
At that, Goku let out a strangled half-sob and jumped to his feet. Before anyone could say a word, he was grasping the edge of the walkway above his head and flipping himself over the railing. Not a small feat, considering that the catwalk was three meters above the floor.
Sanzo just closed his eyes. “Find him,” he said tiredly to no one in particular. He so wasn’t in a mood to deal with any more shit today.
xxx.XXX.xxx
Locating Goku proved to be incredibly simple, Sanzo found. All it took was getting back to his own cabin, in hopes of collapsing on his bed to erase the day from his mind. That strategy had always served him well. Always, discounting the present, obviously. He really shouldn’t have been surprised that, when the door opened, there was Goku, lo and behold, curled on a floor, knees against his chest. His wide eyes were trained on Sanzo, unblinking, as if he was expecting the man to appear in the door.
Fuck it all to hell, the captain thought tiredly, I can’t deal with it.
“Goku,” he said quietly, not moving from the doorway. The softness of his voice surprised him. He was certain his vocal cords didn’t operate on such frequencies. “I need to know you won’t start killing us. What you did back there, with the SOs – I can’t fight that. Kou can’t, Jien can’t, certainly not Yaone or Lirin.”
“I don’t know,” Goku whispered.
“Know what?”
“I don’t know what I did. I never know what I’m doing. Everything just goes foggy, and then I wake up and I lost a day, an hour, and I don’t know what happened, there’s blood on me and they don’t tell me anything.”
Sanzo cast a look to the corridor. It was empty. He sighed to himself. His merry band of morons would think to check in his cabin, eventually. Maybe they’ll discover his rotting corpse, by the time the thought would cross their minds. At least way they’d know to shoot before asking questions. Decision made, he palmed the control pad and the door slid shut behind his back. Couple more clicks, and the red light pronounced to the world that this doorway was locked and the owner would rather it stayed that way.
“I remember stuff,” Goku continued, ignoring the mini drama happening by the entrance. “I hear screaming. Everyone is always screaming. I would look and there’s quiet, than I’m moving, but I don’t know I’m moving, cause I’m trying to stay still, and I hurt them and they start screaming and then they stop, and it’s quiet again. Different quiet. Bad quiet. Empty, cold, horrible! But that’s all I see, there’s me, and I look at them, and I know where to hit so that they start screaming and I just want them to stop, but can’t, cause my body is just moving and I’m killing them, I’m hurting them and they never stop screaming! Even when they’re dead, and they’re silent, they never stop screaming in my head.” He paused. Sanzo stood frozen, leaning against the closed door. Goku took a shuddering breath. His voice was breaking, but his eyes were dry as they stared into Sanzo’s, unwavering, the whole time. “I saw you. I had guns in my hands, Thunderbolt .45, limited special series, serial numbers five-five-dash-seventeen-five-twelve-three and five-five-dash-seventeen-five-twelve-seven, manufactured on Hephaestus, ten shot, semi-automatic. I held them and I saw you and I was gonna shoot, I was gonna kill you and you were already screaming, and I just wanted to make it stop!”
“I wasn’t screaming, monkey.”
“You were hurt.”
“Yeah, one of the fuckers hit me on the head. I’ve had worse.”
“I didn’t want you to scream anymore. Not you.”
This was slowly turning out to be the most surreal night of Sanzo’s life, the several hours of experimentation with hallucinogenic substances in a strobe light happy discotheque included.
“I can handle myself,” he said, his voice rough in comparison to the softness of the last few minutes.
“I don’t want you to scream.”
Sanzo made an effort, something he couldn’t remember ever doing before, and pushed himself away from the door. He crossed the tiny space slowly, hesitating at each step. He was not prepared to deal with emotional breakdowns, in any way, shape or form, unless he was the one having them, in which case a night of drinking, fighting (substitute or add sex) did the job.
Except, he had to do something, because if the stupid monkey went off the deep end, they were all screwed, royally.
He really hated the broken voice and empty expression Goku wore.
Cautiously, Sanzo slid to the floor next to the kid. There he was, Mr Don’t Touch Me, Or Find Your Hand In A Gutter, with nary a clue how to go about fixing things, sitting so close to the little killing machine he could feel him breathe.
“I like your ship,” Goku said eventually. “It’s warm. Everyone is warm and alive. Even Hakkai. He was always just like the rest of them, cold and empty like he was dead, but here everything is different. And Kouryuu. I’ve never seen a real cat. I’ve seen pictures and videos, how they are built, how the muscles work, but never a real cat. I didn’t know anything could be so…” his brows furrowed briefly. “I don’t know what to call it. His fur is soft, and so delicate, and I can feel him breathe all over, and he’s alive.
“And then there’s you.”
“Me?” Sanzo asked, the soft admission shaking him out of the numbness. A hairball on legs, found in a back alley of some rundown urban planet, and Goku made it sound like it was the most brilliant thing he’d ever seen in his life. Not to mention the rather unexpected conclusion. “What about me?”
“You’re hot.”
Right. He probably shouldn’t have been as stunned as he was, it wasn’t like never heard such remarks. He was attractive, he knew. A little too attractive, in his opinion, he could do with a little less attention. Especially since his allure was fairly androgynous, and got him all kinds of attention, most of it unwelcome. Coming from a kid who struggled to come up with the word “fluffy”, it was unexpected, to say the least.
“You’re almost glowing with heat, it’s amazing. I haven’t met anyone who’d be as charged. The people in that white place, some of them were pretty intense, but nowhere near as much as you. None was nowhere near as bright. You’re like the sun.”
Sanzo definitely wasn’t going to blush. He’d been sharing living space with a flamboyant whore for going on a year now, he was as far from virginal as humanly possible, there was no way in hell a psychiatrically challenged kid was going to make him blush.
“You haven’t actually talked much to actual people, have you,” Sanzo said, turning away. Honestly, as if the wide-eyed look of complete adoration wasn’t bad enough. “Idiot.”
“I’m not!”
Sanzo risked a glance. Goku was sticking his bottom lip out. That was not an image he needed at the moment.
“I’m not stupid,” Goku said again.
“No, suppose not.” Stupid people don’t calculate the trajectories of bullets fast enough not to be in their way. Still, the kid failed at social interactions. Then again, an annoying voice in the back of his mind piped up, so did he, according to Kougaji. And Yaone. And Jien. Gojyo, possibly, he didn’t care enough to ask. The redhead had way too many reasons to start talking to him already. So Goku thought he was the best thing since cherry bake wells, discovered roughly two days ago. His head was still no more coherent than the contents of a frying pan, which wasn’t really a compliment to anyone involved.
And alright, the kid was obviously past adolescence and the process had been kind to him. More than kind, Sanzo conceded mentally, thinking back to the mystery crate. Generous even, discounting the army of mad scientists trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place. But he was still completely-
“I’ve killed ninety three people,” Goku said, his tone completely matter-of-fact, “The seven in the hold included. I know how to rig an explosive to a vehicle so that it doesn’t kill the people inside, but will tear them to pieces. I know how to drive a person insane with pain without leaving a mark on them. I know how to hit someone to kill, how to cripple, or just knock out.
“First person I killed was a soldier. Young, maybe twenty five. They brought him and two others in for training. Mine, not theirs. They wanted to see what I could do. They gave me a knife, gave them knives, and made me kill them all. I was twelve. I’m sitting here now and I’m thinking there’s no way I can hurt someone, no way I could ever hurt you. I’d rather die than hurt you. But I also know that I can and I would. I did. Just now. I have no idea what happened. Jien hit me and it all went blank and I can’t remember a thing! It scared me. I didn’t want it to happen again, never again.”
-innocent.
Sanzo took a deep breath. There was fury coiling in the pit of his stomach, like nothing he’d ever felt before.
“I am making a mistake, letting you live.” There was silence. “They won’t get you back. Even if I have to put a bullet in your head so that they don’t.”
Goku stared at him for a minute. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
He didn’t say anything more. When Sanzo checked a few minutes later he was asleep, breathing softly. His compact body was curled into a little ball, warm cheek resting against Sanzo’s shoulder, soft hair tickling his neck.
Definitely not fitting the mental image of a deadly weapon.
