I thought this one up after spending half the day in bed. Sleeping makes the brain juices flow, you know?

Disclaimer: I own Saiyuki. nose extends. I own Gojyo. nose extends further. I'm telling the truth! nose continues to extend.

Okay, okay, I don't really own any of it. Now I'm gonna need plastic surgery...

Sound of the Night

Chapter 1: A Sickeningly Familiar Pattern

It was late at night. Gojyo normally wouldn't have hung around the inn at this time, but he'd lingered to take a much-needed shower and a nap before heading out.

He wasn't sure when he's put two and two together. Maybe it had been long ago and he'd just been in denial for the past month. Maybe he honestly hadn't noticed until now.

It was hard not to notice the sounds coming from the next room.

He was sitting with his back to the wall, head leaned back. Smoke trailed of the cigarette hanging from limp lips.

The noise in the next room got louder.

Gojyo wondered when he was going to leave.

"Sanzo..." A barely audible voice came from the next room. It was laced with tones that Gojyo had never been able to elicit from that familiar throat.

Gojyo left.

It was almost like an old running joke where the punchline had long since ceased to be funny. Gojyo left the inn and walked to the closest bar. There he ordered a drink and threw some cash into the current poker game while four or five beautiful women surrounded him, fairly pawing at him with their thinly-veiled lust. He took one of them upstairs. He fucked her. She fell asleep. He left.

The pattern was so sickeningly familiar that it made him want to get drunk, so he did.

The problem with getting drunk when you're depressed is that it rarely makes you feel better. It's never a good kind of drunk; it's a shitty, run-down, nauseous, fall-over-and-pass-out kind of drunk. But it was better than staying sober.

The barkeeper dragged him out by his shirt when the first rays of dawn thrust through the dusty-cornered windows. Usually Gojyo didn't get that drunk, but he was making an exception for today. And he didn't want to return to the inn until the scent of sex had been washed from Hakkai's clothes.

He was rooming with Goku, who didn't even pause in his snores as Gojyo banged open the door and fairly collapsed on his cot on the floor. Gojyo wasn't in the mood to sleep, but his aching and muzzy head was saying something else and he passed out before he could think too much more.

When under stress or shock, food is supposed to be tasteless. The tea thay Hakkai brewed the next morning for Gojyo's hangover was not tasteless. It was goddamned awful. But Gojyo still felt like shit, and that was only partially because of last night's boozing.

Hakkai smiled his empty smile as he handed Gojyo the cup. He said something typically condensending but it didn't register in Gojyo's ears. He avoided Hakkai's eyes. He drank the tea in a couple of swallows, and then he went back upstairs.

I wonder if he'll follow me, Gojyo thought absentmindedly. No. He won't. The little fuck is guilty. The little fuck.

Gojyo tried not to be mad at Hakkai. He wasn't mad at Sanzo, funny enough; he was usually mad at Sanzo about something. But he couldn't be mad at Sanzo for wanting to fuck Hakkai. Who could?

I'm just fucking pissed the priest got there first.