28. Black Rose; Death

(Thank You Kindly)

Word Count: 1374

Hakkai and Sanzo always get depressed on rainy days. Their journey is endless, but it's even more forestalled when it's raining. This, of course, pisses Gojyo off to no end, and he can only sit in the inn or the tent or the jeep and watch the two of them brood, going through pack after pack of cigarettes. It's an easy way to deplete his stock of Hi-Lites, and provides an excuse for him to take Goku with him and escape their insufferable melancholy, and he always makes sure to tell them that they're being pains in the asses (and add that Sanzo is never not one).

It's all true -- his disdain is real, his unease, his urge to fidget whenever these kinds of days roll around. Still, he can't deny that he doesn't understand where Hakkai's coming from. It's not easy to forget the day that you meet the person you're going to be tied to for the rest of your life; it's not hard to remember the expression in his eyes, the way they're begging you to just end it.

But you're too annoying to do that.

Gojyo clearly remembers standing over him, completely caught up in those soulless eyes, transfixed. He recalls the rain soaking into his clothes, into his skin, into his bones, just staring at the dying man blocking his way home. It would be simple to walk around him, to keep going; simple to keep living the life he'd always lived, surviving by the skin of his teeth, making his way with card games and bets. That would be so easy, and, just for a second, like the flicker of a candle's flame, he considers it.

It's dismissed as he leans down in the mud, his eyes never disconnecting with those piercing green ones, and his large hands go to the sopping wet clothing of the dying man, soaked equally with blood as it is with rain. The red stain on the road starts to seep into Gojyo's jeans, and soon he's wearing the other man's crime just as assuredly as the criminal is. The flesh beneath the torn clothes is solid, hard, and briefly he thinks of how easily the man could die, and that all of that hard, living flesh could be nothing but the remnants of a person.

Forcefully, Gojyo pushes him onto his back and is in turn greeted with the non-so-pleasant sight of all sorts of indefinable guts spilling out of that ugly, garish slash on the man's stomach. He looks at it just long enough to gather them all in his hand, and then, wrenching his gaze to the man's face, he shoves all of those tools and wires that keep a body going back into it. He fully expects to see pain on the man's face, and instead sees nothing. He isn't registering anything.

Unresponsive.

Uncaring.

Gojyo can read his thoughts:

Kill me, please, and thank you kindly.

"No thanks," Gojyo mutters, and, pulling his hand out of the man's stomach, wipes the excess of blood and gore that had accumulated on it against the wet denim of his jeans before reaching forward, grabbing the man's arm, and yanking him to his feet. Blood gushes and spills down his front, and Gojyo puts a protective hand over the wound he'd tried to at least stabilize before starting what he knew would be a slow tread. The man is leaning entirely on him, his head forward, chin on his chest. His eyes are closed now. "Don't die," he says, somewhat angrily, and feels that it is out of his character to act so compassionate for this complete stranger. "I don't wanna have put my hand in someone's guts and then have them die on me, alright?"

The man doesn't respond. Gojyo doesn't expect him to.

---

After the doctor has come and gone and Gojyo has taken a cigarette outside in the rain (because, although anarchy has been one of his chief traits, he can't bring himself to disobey the small little man's orders), he goes back inside and sits down on the bed beside the man. He is pale, his forehead is covered with a strip of bandage, and something's up with that right eye of his. The ugly wound, now meticulously sewn up and bandaged, is hidden under a shirt and blankets, but Gojyo can still see it.

The man looks like he's dead, and the only thing that differentiates him from a corpse is the way his lips twitch when he breathes -- through his mouth, which suggested to Gojyo that he was suffering a cold or allergies of some kind. His breathing is shallow enough that even the rise and fall of his shoulders aren't visible under the heavy blankets and thick, oversized shirt. Gojyo realizes, in a very clichéd fashion, that the man would not have had to wait much longer for death if Gojyo hadn't come along and decided to save him.

He has never had a chance to realize it before, since it has never happened before, but Gojyo thinks that there is something strangely endearing about having a man in his bed. Or maybe it's that it is this particular man, and that another would just look like a member of the opposite sex under his sheets, not a man in his bed, as strange is it seems to him.

This man has long hair, but it's not nearly as long as his, and not a disgusting color, either. Roughly, Gojyo brushes back the fall of bangs that hides most of the right side of that pale face, but it slips back into place shortly after. It was a useless action, but it doesn't piss Gojyo off like it should have.

He stands up, goes around to the low headboard, and, leaning over the man's now upside-down face, plants his hands on either side of the pillow. His long red bangs nearly touch the white bandages wrapped neatly around the white forehead. Red on white, like the man's shirt, now stuffed in a box in his kitchen designated for trash. His shirts are too big for this lithe man; they were made to fit around Gojyo's corded, muscled upper arms, not cover the skinny sticks this man has the gall to call arms. Gojyo likes the thought of wearing the shirt he'd given the doctor when asked; likes the thought of filling it out, of walking in front of this man and showing him how you really are supposed to wear it.

It's a silly, stupid idea, one that Gojyo himself barely understands he is entertaining. He'd never thought so deeply about a woman when she was lying in his bed, clinging to him while high on the afterglow, or sprawled on his sheets like a spilled drink. He finds it unnerving.

He stands upright and heads to the kitchen. After a night like this one, he needs alcohol.

--

Gojyo sits, this time, in the room he's sharing with his three traveling companions. He watches Sanzo brood by the window, staring out into the rainy twilight; watches Goku inhale the last of their food on his bed; and then, for a long time, watches Hakkai, who is not chiding Goku or attempting to cheer up Sanzo, but lying down despondently on the bed, listening intently to the rain drumming on the roof but not watching it like Sanzo is. It is one of the brief moments that he is completely absorbed in himself.

This unnerves Gojyo, and, in a way that is very much like himself, he goes over to interrupt Hakkai's would-be pity party. He sits down on the side of the bed, mechanically cracks a joke on Sanzo (who ignores him), and waits for Hakkai to snap out of it, to think about Gojyo again, to realize that his life is not his to live alone, but one to be shared.

He laughs, accepting the joke with practiced good humor. Gojyo grins rakishly and delves into any topic that he can think of to keep Hakkai talking, to show him that he is not dead, but, in fact, very much alive.