#that's not even mentioning how gojyo can bring hakkai out of the beginnings of the minus wave's effects on his sanity

[recre8ed]

truthfully, i've been thinking a lot about hakkai and gojyo's dynamic tonight!

this contrast in particular gets me somehow. well, these two things actually happen fairly far apart from eachother, but there's something about the way hakkai describes finding the state of their home after kanan's kidnapping contrasted by the fact that when hakkai is confronted with someone out for his life, gojyo actually DOES feel something like a sixth sense for the danger hakkai is in.

really, that sort of thing remains constant in their relationship from this point up until the present. hakkai might share more explicit and serious conversations with sanzo, but the constant awareness of danger—the noticing!—is a trait that is unique to his relationship with gojyo.

hakkai returns the favor a couple times. in burial, he manages to arrive at the right time and place to save gojyo from banri's 'creditors', and then much later he's the first to notice, incidentally, when gojyo develops a youkai mark.

gojyo does this right back to hakkai, too, at the start of the chin yisou arc. he's the first to both notice and take action on hakkai's turbulent mood over chin yisou's presence and recent actions.

anyway, it's not like there's any new information in this post, but their bond was on my mind.

[saiyukisecretsanta-blog]

Recipient: Akiko Natsuko

Writer’s Name: Del

Profile Links: Tumblr, AO3

Title: Snow Drop 3: After

Characters: Cho Hakkai, Genjo Sanzo, mentions of Son Goku, Sha Gojyo, and Yakumo

Pairing: Gen 383 (i.e., the piece involves notably more friendship/companionship/support than romance)

Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene

Rating: T

Warnings: None

Part I: Sanzo

“…I’ll kill you.”

That was what he’d said, when the kid had almost asked.

He’d meant it, too. He’d turned the idea over and over in his head before the kid had even opened his mouth, and he’d concluded that he had no interest in seeing the kid suffer, or tear a town to shreds, or get himself irreparably damaged or eternally damned.

Sanzo frowns. He pulls in a shallow breath through his teeth, and fixes his weary eyes on the shortest of the three huddled forms trudging in front of him through the snow. For all he knows, the kid is hurtling headlong towards a fate worse than anything he could ever imagine - though, he acknowledges, that doesn’t exactly rule out a whole lot of possibilities. He’s prided himself on a few things throughout the years, but creativity has never been one of them.

A gloved fist shoots sideways out from under the kid’s cloak, and makes clumsy contact with the figure walking directly beside him. A shout shoots upwards, rising like a gunshot through the muffled quiet of the snowy landscape, and the next thing Sanzo knows, a flurry of blows joins the flurry of snowflakes. It’s as if Gojyo and Goku have taken it upon themselves to whip up a winter storm in miniature; their stupid, squabbling scuffle, much like a snowstorm, is completely expected, and it’s completely mundane, and it’s a completely natural phenomenon, and it’s the kind of thing that Sanzo takes an inordinate amount of grudging pleasure in complaining about - but it’s also the kind of thing that warms the heart, just a little bit.

Not, Sanzo thinks as the two dumbasses ahead of him start kicking each other with their heavy boots, that I’ll ever let them know that.

In his musings, Sanzo’s steps have slowed somewhat; abruptly, he realizes just how far behind the rest of his party he’s fallen. That’s what comes from getting all caught up in your head, dammit, he thinks, feeling his frown deepen on his chapped lips. He mutters a tight-jawed string of expletives, and he stifles a shiver, and he picks up his dragging feet, and he forces himself to surge forward with new force and vigor. Not for the first time, he curses his human stamina, and, not for the last time, he curses his travelling companions’ boundless energy. For good measure, he curses the cold and the snow, too. As he shuffles unenthusiastically forward, he squints up at the thick blanket of grey overhead. Maybe the sun will set soon, and maybe it won’t. In this ghastly, gods-damned weather, it’s impossible to tell.

“If it’s any consolation,” comes a gentle voice, rising thinly like stale smoke from one of the cloaked figures up ahead, “I’m of the belief that we should take shelter soon.”

Sanzo nods curtly. “Fine by me.”

“I thought it might be.” Hakkai turns to look over his shoulder, and he smiles. “Are you cold, Sanzo?”

As if in response, a fierce and violent gust of wind sweeps savagely through the mountain pass, knocking Sanzo’s hood off of his head and whipping at his grimy hair. Sanzo tugs his hood back on, hunches his shoulders, stuffs his hands underneath his armpits, and pins Hakkai with a flat and unfaltering stare. “That,” he says, unamused, “is a dumb question.”

And so, they walk on slowly, in soft, snow-stifled silence.

It’s not his fault, Sanzo decides as they soldier on together through the snow, that his thoughts keep sliding back to the kid’s unasked question. He couldn’t blame the kid, not really, for his inability to actually say the words - and, in truth, Sanzo admires the kid for having the balls to start asking the question at all. He remembers how loud the kid’s voice had been when he’d begun to speak, and he remembers how abruptly the kid had cut himself off, too. Did he shut himself up for my sake, Sanzo wonders vaguely, or for his own? Either way, Sanzo recognizes, it must have taken the kid a hell of a lot of effort to reel his question in like that. Self-control and restraint weren’t exactly the kid’s trademarks.

Self-control and restraint.

Sanzo starts.

Shit, he thinks.

Almost involuntarily, Sanzo feels for the familiar weight of his banishing gun at his hip. He’s seen what it’s like when the kid goes crazy, but he has no idea what to expect when the tightest-wound bastard he knows finally lets loose. Gojyo and Goku, he knows, have both witnessed it firsthand, but it’s not like they bring it up in idle conversation. And, really, it’s not like Sanzo can get upset with them for not wanting to talk about something like that. For one thing, Hakkai, limiters and all, would probably rip their freaking heads off if they dared to broach the subject. For another, Sanzo suspects that Gojyo and Goku don’t have an especially strong desire to revisit those memories, if they can help it. Sanzo can’t be sure, of course, but he has an inkling that Hakkai, unbound and unlimited, is scary as all hell.

When daylight begins to fade, Hakkai shepherds the party into a tiny, tidy, tucked-away cave, and he busies himself, bustling incessantly with crockery and clotheslines. (“Our cloaks are soaked through,” he’d said, with that cloying chuckle of his, “and unless there’s a dramatic change in the weather, I doubt we’ll be able to do without them tomorrow.”) Gojyo and Goku eat noisily by the fire and then lounge lazily on the floor, and before long, the sounds of their snores begin to rise and roll gently through the cave.

Sanzo huddles, solitary and silent, in a shadowy corner. He watches. He smokes one cigarette, and then he smokes another. He thinks. He sleeps, and he wakes, and he sleeps again, and he wakes again. He thinks some more. He lets his eyes wander to the edges of the cave, where Goku and Gojyo sprawl and snore side by side, looking deceptively carefree and serene. He lets his eyes wander to the center of the cave, where Hakkai perches, back straight as a rod and shoulders quivering, staring like his sorry life depends on it into the dying vestiges of their cookfire.

A quiet pop rises from the flames, and the light in the cave shifts, catching and glinting, for the briefest of moments, on the three small pieces of metal clipped almost inconspicuously to Hakkai’s ear.

And Sanzo, once again, frowns.

He heaves a sigh, and he rises. He shuffles, deliberately making more noise than is actually necessary, but Hakkai doesn’t turn around. Poor bastard, Sanzo thinks, something almost like sympathy twisting in his gut. He has no doubt that Hakkai is lost somewhere inside the darkest corners of his own head, and that, Sanzo imagines, probably isn’t an excessively fun place to be.

I owe it to him to let him know, Sanzo resolves, fingers brushing his gun once more. If nothing else, Sanzo needs the party’s only healer and best driver to be sharp and ready for when the snow finally lets up. Hakkai has yet to get so caught up in his own shit that he gets negligent, or stupid, or makes the rest of the group pay for his mistakes - but, truth be told, Sanzo wouldn’t put it past the guy. Maybe it would be an accident, and maybe it wouldn’t.

Either way, that’s not a risk that Sanzo is willing to take.

Part II: Hakkai

He’s not about to pretend that sleep will come to him easily. It would be pointless, because it would be a lie, and lies, he has learned, help no one.

Small untruths, he established some time ago through careful deduction and occasional practice, are another matter - but lies, he is certain, help no one.

The flames play tricks on his mismatched eyes tonight. He’s never found the act of staring into a fire excessively pleasant, but he knows that other people sometimes take comfort in it - Gojyo, for one, has expressed that on more than one occasion, and he cannot deny that he often sees a pale wash of relief cross Sanzo’s face when, at the end of a long and trying day of travel, Hakkai sets wood and kindling ablaze and stokes it to bright and bolstering life.

Hakkai, for his part, has not thought of fire that way for a long, long time. Fire can wreak deadly havoc, if it is not kept in check - and Hakkai, through long hours of consideration and contemplation, has concluded that no true comfort can be found in a thing that can kill.

Hakkai gazes deep and darkly into the flickering flames. If I wanted to, he muses, I could burn my own hand. I could burn away all of my flesh. It would be easy…

He fancies that the fire shows him familiar faces. He sees leering thugs with pointed ears and pointed sticks. He sees wide, wild eyes bulging from hollow sockets. He sees lovers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, rent asunder and wrenched apart by madness and sadness in brutally equal measure. He sees children, hungry for blood and hoping for victory, too simple and too ignorant to guess at their inevitable fates. He sees a smiling father, a kindly spark of stray warmth amidst the cold.

All of them had been sane, once.

And, Hakkai notes numbly, all of them are dead, now.

The tips of his fingers, he is mildly shocked and more than a little bit angry to discover, are trembling. Why? Hakkai dares to ask of himself. Why is this happening? What have I done wrong? He stretches his fingers as far as they can go, and then curls them tight into a clamped-down, clenched-up fist. He has been rigorous and unforgiving in the training of his body, and even more so in the training of his mind. But still, he thinks, furious, still, I lack control! And if he cannot, by the force of his strong will, control something as small and as simple as the state of his ill-formed, ill-fated, ill-used, hands, then surely -

A faint click, followed by a sharp hiss and a satisfied sigh of contentment, sound softly through the cave.

I should have known, Hakkai thinks dimly. I should have known that he would be awake on a night like tonight. Rain and snow, he reasons, aren’t wholly dissimilar, when all is said and done.

Sure enough, a series of even footsteps soon falls upon the gravelly ground and echoes dully in Hakkai’s distracted ears. They approach, and they stop, and the next thing Hakkai knows, Sanzo has dropped down to sit beside him, a cigarette in his hand and a scowl on his face.

“Too cold to sleep, huh?” Sanzo asks.

“What,” Hakkai says, keeping his words low and slow and even, “gives you that idea?”

Sanzo takes a long drag on his cigarette as he considers the question. “You’re shaking.”

“Am I?” Hakkai runs a nervous hand through his hair. “That’s funny, Sanzo - I’d scarcely noticed.” Small untruths, he thinks again, glancing at his pale fingers and seeing the way they still tremble.

Sanzo shrugs. “Sure,” he says.

Hakkai can read the blunt disbelief in Sanzo’s expression. He licks his lips, and scrabbles desperately for a verbal defense of some kind. “I suppose,” he says, “that I shouldn’t be surprised, should I?” He turns a sickly smile on Sanzo, and he lets out a short, light laugh. “After all, that sort of thing is the human body’s natural response to subzero temperatures, isn’t it?”

Sanzo’s face is impassive. “The human body,” he repeats.

Hakkai internally curses his poor choice of words.

At a loss, Hakkai turns slowly away from the fire and towards his fellow sleepless companion. The flames have cast strange shadows on Sanzo’s sharp face, throwing its angles into strange and stark relief. The shadows make Sanzo look both oddly young and very old at the same time - and, curiously, Hakkai can’t help but think that they lend Sanzo’s sharp face an uncanny touch of softness, too.

Sanzo takes another pull on his cigarette. “Look,” he says, thickly.  He pauses, pursing his lips and sending a stream of smoke up towards the roof of the cave. “You don’t have to worry about that, Hakkai. All right?”

“Excuse me?” Anger flares, sudden and hot, in Hakkai’s chest. “Frankly, Sanzo, I don’t believe you’re qualified to say something like that.”

“Oh, no?”

“No.”

“And why might that be?”

“If you can’t figure that out for yourself, then I’m not sure this conversation is worth having.” Hakkai grits his teeth, and turns his gaze back to the fire. “Perhaps,” he says darkly, “I’ll speak with Goku about it. He’ll understand.”

For a moment, the only sounds in the cave are the crackling of the fire and the restless rumble of snores.

And then, Hakkai cringes, and he hangs his head.

“I’m sorry, Sanzo,” he says. “I was cruel, and I didn’t need to be. It’s just - ” He pauses, hesitating. What, he wonders, can I say to a man who has never known this fear? How can I express to him what it’s like to slip entirely away from your mind, and then return to it again? How can I show him what it means to witness your full potential from the outside in, and to see that that potential can only be realized through madness? He swallows, and he clenches his fists even tighter, and he does his damnedest to ignore the twisting shapes in the flames, but always, always, try though he might, they resurface before his penitent eyes.

It’s only when he feels a rough hand settle on top of his own that he finds he can pry his gaze away.

Hakkai stares, shocked, at Sanzo. Sanzo, in turn, levels Hakkai with a look that’s shot through with cool distance and disinterest. Hakkai opens his mouth to speak, but for the second time that night - and the third time this day, he thinks, remembering how he felt when Goku had almost expressed aloud what he himself was holding, locked up tight, inside his heart - he can find no words.

“I saved your life once,” Sanzo says. “Never doubt that I can end it just as easily.”

Despite himself, Hakkai feels a sardonic smile twist at his lips. “That fight,” he reminds Sanzo, “was hard-won.”

“I got what I wanted, didn’t I?”

Hakkai’s smile grows, just a little. “Yes,” he acknowledges. “You did.”

Sanzo’s hand tightens on top of Hakkai’s. “I need you to sleep,” he says. His voice low, and markedly unenthusiastic.  “You know how inconvenient it is for everyone when you run yourself ragged like this, right?”

“Yes,” Hakkai says softly. “Yes, I do.”

“It’s a real pain in the ass when you get sick, too - so, if you’re actually shaking because you’re cold, you better find yourself a blanket or a cup of tea or something. Got it?”

The smile upon Hakkai’s lips grows even more. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I’ve got it.” He can’t help but be amused; it’s just like Sanzo, after all, to disguise his genuine concern as a matter of practicality.

With that, Sanzo stands. As he traipses back to his lonely corner of the cave, he stretches, working the kinks out of his spine and his neck. “I want to be on the road early tomorrow if the snow clears up,” he says. “Think you can make that happen?”

Hakkai nods. “Of course.”

“Good.” Sanzo plunks himself down against the wall of the cave. “Sleep well, you moron,” he says, closing his eyes, “or I’ll kill you.”

Hakkai opens his hands. To his great surprise, they’re not trembling anymore.

That, and that alone, gives him the strength to ask one more question.

“…Sanzo?”

Sanzo grumbles incoherently, before he lets one drooping eye slide open. “Yeah?”

 “That’s just it,” Hakkai says. “I’m not sure that’s what I want.”

Sanzo flashes Hakkai a tired smirk. “Better insane than dead, huh?”

“I… truly don’t know…”

Sanzo’s hand strays to his hip, and his smirk melts, becoming sad, and sorry, and empty. “I wish things were different, Hakkai,” he says quietly. “I really do.” His eyes gleam, bright and fierce, from where he reclines in his corner. “But the truth is, that isn’t your choice to make.”