by K.A. Rose
Gensomaden Saiyuki characters et cetera © and ™ Kazuya Minekura, ENIX and TV Tokyo, 1997. Used without permission, for nonprofit fan appreciation. (Yes, appreciation. Even if this one hell of an odd way of showing it.)
This is a sort of idea-darkfic set for Saiyuki the Movie, Requiem. It's not happy. In fact it's rather bad.
This fanfic is rated A:VLST, meaning it is rated Adult (no one under the physical/emotional age of 17 permitted) for violence, language, sexual content, and topic. Among the more objectionable articles contained within are rape and character death. As another disclaimer, I should warn my girlfriend was distracting me with cuddly fluffy bunniness for some parts of this, which, while I don't mind in the slightest, might have lead to some spottiness in the narrative. In which case, my apologies.
...That's right. I won't apologize for the rape and character death, but slightly skimpy narration, you betcha.
Well, anyway, enj-- Well, I couldn't ask you to enjoy this. But. Erm. Have fun?
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All pains reached an end. Everything faded with time. Everything dwindled and fell apart or else switched off and blanked out. If you couldn't destroy a pain, it would destroy itself. Or else your brain could shut itself off to it and dissolve it into the background noise, and you would be safe again.
Liar.
The only word for it was nightmare. A neverending nightmare from which there was nothing, not even the hope of waking up. One fatal wrong move was all it had taken. And now he saw their shallow graves from the window of his prison where the birds came and pecked at the soil at the scent of rotting flesh. He could smell it too.
Because Dougan wore it too. It hung off him like a mantle, clung to hair and skin and nails, lurked in beady black eyes that drew tight with frenzy every time they saw him, huddled in a corner with the remains of a once-white robe without sutra or gun or life left within him.
Pain did not fade, nor hunger. His hunger, Go Dougan's long-repressed lust, greedy and insatiable, that brought him to the room in which he'd thrown the defeated priest, time after time, whenever he felt like it, guided on impulse and a careening mad desire.
He took Sanzo violently, tearing at flesh with his nails, shredding at his insides. He revelled in the blood and the screams of agony he evoked and did it again and again like shooting up with a powerful drug. Sanzo was his drug, to consume and suck dry and hollow out from the inside.
The addiction didn't fade. Couldn't fade. Only grew worse with time. And it couldn't end, had no way of ending, no matter what Sanzo did or how he fought. Fighting was useless. It was all useless.
The first night when it had happened and Dougan fucked him right there on the floor in a pool of Goku's blood, Sanzo had sworn he would sooner bite his tongue off and die than submit. And that was exactly what he did.
And Dougan had sewn it back on and fused it whole again. And then had his way with him.
Punished him severely, dragged his claws down his chest, all but ripped him apart, tore through flesh and sinew and bone as easily as though it were paper, till the blood was smeared up to his elbows-- then magicked Sanzo like new as soon as the fear set in through his insanity over what he'd done. The harm done to his precious prize. His little china doll. His sweet and dear obsession he had done so much for. Killed for.
The wounds would be gone but the pain was still fresh, and worse than that all was the window, the sight of three recent graves and not even having the power to scare away the carrion birds digging and scratching at the dirt with the instinctual knowledge of the food buried underneath and pecking hungrily to unearth it. Pecking and pecking and pecking. Each wash of rain wearing away a layer of soil until sooner or later their efforts were going to be rewarded with a half-decayed hand or a bent and shattered neck. Their beaks would pull off the flesh of fingers that had strived until death to protect him and failed. Leave only bloody bones until the rain ate even that away and left nothing but a shadow of unbanished spirits.
And still he would be here, in this room. Bound up with ropes that ground his wrists raw with his struggles, or else left free to thrash and fight helplessly and futily against his captor, who would not let him even die. Who whispered fealty and unending love in his ear as he slit his throat with a thick and jagged claw so that Sanzo could not even gurgle a protest. Left him that way until Sanzo's vision started fading and he prayed to anything that Dougan would forget and just let him bleed to death quietly, only to feel a thin hand around his throat with that hated curing touch and in a second or two find he could breathe again. In time for his throat to constrict trying to hold back tears. It was everything to manage it, but he had to try, had to force himself to hold it back, not for pride or dignity but for the big question mark of what his former disciple might do if he saw him cry.
Sometimes Dougan didn't hurt him at all, at least not with his hands. Sometimes Sanzo made the mistake to speak and he would be forced up against that window, clutching for purchase on the cold glass, and Dougan pounded in so hard that it felt like he was being split in two, the blood flowed dark and thick and no focusing in the world could remove Sanzo from a single second of the pain. Forced to look out across the field at his three buried companions and be reminded of what he had done, what he had caused, the guilt on his soul and the right Dougan had to punish him, to hurt him, to rip him apart from the inside.
And he couldn't. do. anything.
Through it all he still came during a few of their sessions, shuddering and hard and with a scream of sobbing defeat from his lips, brought to a sensation he didn't want, hated and betrayed by his body. Dougan had noticed only after he'd completed, and then descended upon Sanzo's stomach and lapped up the bitterly spilled seed along with the blood smeared across his skin. And come back up with his mouth red like whore's lipstick and forcing into a kiss, hot tongue in Sanzo's mouth so strong and overpowering that he couldn't dare to bite down out of fear. But he gagged, not at the taste of his own ejaculate but of his own copper, sour blood. The blood that lingered in his mouth even long after Dougan had healed him up and left.
He had no strength. He had no power. He couldn't even die successfully, much less do anything else. He wasn't fed but he didn't starve to death. He lost blood that wasn't replaced but he couldn't even manage to faint. He was to be sustained like this forever, until it all broke or his captor grew bored of him. And Go Dougan had never been someone that bored easily.
If he could break the glass of his window, he could get a big enough piece and slit his wrists and maybe die before the man discovered him.
What about escaping?
What, and do what?
What about your mission?
What mission?
What about revenge?
...To what end? To what possible end?
He could hit the glass and all it did was hurt his hand. There was nothing in the room he could throw. The only furniture was the broken and ragged four-poster with the unwashed sheets, stained so deep with body fluids that it would never come clean. Reeked of sex, reeked worse of blood dried and crusted and stagnating in filth. Should have been enough to choke him unconscious but it only made his head swim and his vision blur and his legs fail beneath him whenever he tried to stand.
Three unmarked graves outside his window, but he could tell who occupied each. Once or twice he saw shadows lurking in the forest and remembered something Hakkai had said of how Sanzo would be too proud to give them the last rites, the sacred sutras needed to break their spirits from their corporeal bodies.
Liar. Yes he would. He would have. Really. He just never thought it'd come to that.
And now he'd forgotten the words.
Soon he had a feeling he was going to forget everything, under the pain and Dougan's claws and his mad ravings about eternal love. Soon maybe he'd lose even himself in this, be left numb to it all and maybe too broken to even hurt. Too hollow to even remember the voices he'd said he'd hated, the faces that beamed up at him despite every snarled insult, the quick touches and soft remarks he'd never thought he'd miss.
And he shouldn't have been made to reconsider. He didn't want to be made to question. More than the tightening in his chest was the agony of why it should be there in the first place.
Couldn't even break the damn glass.
Couldn't even die properly.
What the hell was he anymore?
And the bolts of his door were sliding back.
Weeks now, and they were still trapped in this damn forest. It was magical, they knew, and maybe normally Kougaiji could have breached the seal like he had to get them in, but they were worn and tired, malnourished and at the end of all possible limits.
Eventually, they came upon the house's front entrance. They debated about whether to procede for well over a day before deciding, and when they finally did, it was everything not to immediately turn around and escape with all possible speed. Even the more nonmagical of the four could sense it with all the subtlety of a frying pan to the back of the head: there was something very wrong with this place. The very air was crawling.
Unfortunately, as Kougaiji's reasoning went, this probably meant they were in the right place. So they kept going.
The compound was expansive, but all the rooms that could be seen were dark, save a handful near the rear by one of the gardens. There was no easy way to them save taking a trip across the water, and even if they could get a boat or something to ferry them they wouldn't have done it. The water looked wrong. Too black. Creeped a little too close to the edge of the bridge. And the reflection of the moon that wasn't there shimmered just a bit too lively on the waving surface.
They took the indirect route through the rooms instead. They noticed their disuse, the coat of dust over the furniture, the path of footprints they left on the floors. One hallway, abruptly, was very clean and the rugs were worn in a line, as though someone had been taking this hall habitually for some time. They followed this lead, into a sequence of consecutively larger halls, until a larger square room that might have been a dining room of some kind.
It was Kougaiji that smelled it first. That was the part that made him hesitate and stop their procession, because he knew any closer and Lirin with her almost equal senses would pick it up too. And Dokugakuji and Yaone wouldn't be far behind.
He swallowed a dry throat. The hairs on his forearms were standing up. Even his ears were twinging.
"Yaone," he managed eventually. "We're splitting up. Take Lirin and check the other hall."
"But oniichan--" Lirin began.
"Don't argue," her brother snapped back, before she could get up momentum.
When the women where gone, he beckoned Dokugakuji closer to him. And he waited until the warrior could pick up the smell.
Human blood was distinctive to trained youkai senses. And there was something in it beyond that too, some particular quality of it they could only pick up for how frequently they'd smelled it the past few months. Genjo Sanzo bled a lot. It was one of his more endearing qualities.
But not in this. Especially as they edged closer and the backs of their necks prickled upon picking up the smell of other things, stronger things, vile and pugnant and somehow alive following the growing screams. And moans. And what felt like something tearing wetly, like skin raggedly cut...
Dokugakuji didn't speak, but touched Kougaiji's arm as they found themselves in what seemed to be some sort of bedroom, dark, beyond which lay a hallway. It was unused, the crumpled contents on the bed a seeming random pile of dusty clothes and curtains. A scrap of leather. Something silver.
Kougaiji reached down into the pile and touched on the cold handle of High Priest Genjo Sanzo's Smith & Wesson M10.
It was flecked with blood. Dried. After a moment's puzzled inspection he got the chamber out and saw it had two bullets left. Dokugakuji's quick search of the pile yielded no more, so Kougaiji closed the chamber again. Soft click as it snapped into place.
Their silent procession down the ajoining hallway ended abruptly, their feet stopped before a rectangle of yellow light smearing on the floor out from an open doorway, but they could have been blind and still known to stop, the smell all but making their heads ring and the sounds enough to know what the view from the door couldn't.
Kougaiji, who had never held a gun in his life before that moment, wrapped
a finger around the trigger as they started forward.
Sanzo lay limp and unresisting, gone past his point a long time ago while Dougan built up for his third round. The crusted, filth-ridden sheets dug into his slashed back, ground in as his captor moved over him, thrusting with frenzied pace, claws digging into the flesh of his hips to keep the grip tight. The red was blotched and mismatched in Dougan's hair, all of that from the house youkai faded, the blood from Sanzo's companions washed out and dull, and Sanzo's own blood an incompatible fresh hue in uneven streaks. Ragged locks danced over the priest's shredded chest, pooled in curls as Dougan leaned down and grabbed Sanzo roughly with a fistful of blond hair.
"Do you love me? Sanzo-sama..."
He twisted the hair in his grip when silence was his only answer. Sanzo couldn't suppress the grunt of pain.
"Tell me what's left for you now, besides me. There's nothing. There's only me. You can't love the dead. I did what they couldn't, see? I'm more worthy. I deserve it, not them."
As easily as he'd started this mid-coital courtship, Dougan fell into carnal distraction again, the gashes carved into Sanzo's thighs pulling him back into his red haze, hunched forward with quickened thrusts, forgetting his grip on the priest's hair. Sanzo's head fell back and shook with the rest of his body at the fevered pounding. He let it loll to one side, eyes blank and glossy and staring at nothing, just the empty shadows of the doorway.
He saw something move.
It was the smell of gunpowder that reached him, not the crack, the explosion that sliced the air and took a clean hit right to Go Dougan's skull.
He landed on his side next to Sanzo on the bed, in a damp splatter of his own blood. Throat straining against lungs that had ceased functioning, his eyes snapped open painfully wide and unfocused, staring up toward the ceiling.
Sanzo knew he should move. But. He couldn't.
"Doku," said a part of the shadow.
The other part nodded and detached itself, became a figure in white that strode quickly over to the bed and pulled off his dress without worrying for the clasps, stripped down to his trousers as he leaned over with the offered garment to wrap over Sanzo like a blanket.
"It won't kill him," Sanzo croaked, voice barely a thread of a whisper, but heard anyway in the steel silence of the room.
"I know," Kougaiji said, stepping forward into the candlelight. He looked over to his companion again. "Blade."
Dokugakuji nodded, pulling back from Sanzo for a moment and making a small gesture in the air. A glimmer turned into a stream of light, that collected and crystalized, formed his trademark sword. He tossed it to his master, who caught it one-handed, eyes not leaving the twitching, gurgling near-corpse next to Sanzo on the bed, struggling through the damage to repair himself with his own magic.
"Get him to Yaone. Don't let Lirin see him," Kougaiji instructed, as Dokugakuji lifted Sanzo's frail form easily in his arms, as though he were carrying a doll or a child. He made to hand his servant the gun as well, but with Dokugakuji's arms both occupied, sufficed to stuff it down the side of his pants instead, as cold and removed as he could manage to make it look. His servant respectfully took it in stride and continued out.
Sanzo's eyes met with Kougaiji's as Dokugakuji passed.
"...Why are... you..."
"Talk and you'll injure yourself," Kougaiji said, in the same stern tone. "And how could we have reasons for you right now anyway?"
The priest had no answer. He let his head fall back against Dokugakuji's arm and the warrior continued to carry him out of the room into the hall. Sanzo craned his head back as they exited, in time to see the youkai prince stalk over to his former disciple and pull him roughly by the ankle until he thudded on the floor. Then he lifted the sword.
They rounded a corner just as Kougaiji swung. Sanzo heard only the sound of that stone blade connecting with Go Dougan's neck.
And then he started swinging again.
Yaone followed Dokugakuji's calls and met them in the dining hall. Lirin was not with her, but by the sounds of complaints from the other door was nearby. Dokugakuji didn't waste time, clearing the dust off the neglected dining table and setting the priest down upon it. Unthinkingly, he removed the stained coat before he'd given Yaone time to steady herself, and after she'd gotten a good first look by the candlelight she all but fainted on the spot.
"You can't lose it now," Dokugakuji told her strongly, steadying her shaking shoulders. "Dammit. Pull it together."
She didn't.
He slapped her.
"It's not needed," Sanzo said, barely more than a hissing compression of his lungs, rather than a voice at all. He tried curling onto his side and gritted his teeth, biting back a shout. "...Just..."
"No," the alchemist murmured, cheek stinging, but with fingers steady. "No, I can do this."
She was not a chi healer. She knew it. Dokugakuji knew it. Sanzo probably knew it the best, grunting under the inexpert touch that could barely begin to mend the skin. But what else could she do. She had nothing left, no herbs, not even gauze. Just some tricks Hakkai-dono had taught her that she'd never used. It was all she had. It was all any of them had.
She pulled everything she had into the spell, hands together held over the pouring wounds, eyes closed, focusing as she'd been instructed and feeling the energy move in her and connect and weave.
It wasn't enough. She needed more. So many cuts, so many deep wounds in too many places... Mend here, weave, sew, seal, patch together raw materials out of nothing. It was the act of willing with chi the subject's healing to speed up its own repairs, and it did it by taking Yaone's power as an energy source.
Come on. Little more. Close it, repair the vein, reattach the lines of muscles. Every thread of atoms was a feat against nature and the chi it took was incredible, even for so little.
Yaone all but collapsed against the table when finished, straining to hold herself up with her arms. Most of the wounds, the deepest wounds, had closed, but Sanzo was still...
She started to cry. "I can't--"
"It'll do for now," Dokugakuji said hurriedly. He pushed the soiled dress at her. "Help me tear this. Bandages. We'll at least bind it."
They started at the hem and tore huge white strips of jagged length, frayed and rippled, already stained with some of the priest's blood even before they started to wrap the rest of his wounds, at least the ones they knew how to bind. The rest of the garment was barely a coat when they were done, but it sufficed, wrapping it around Sanzo's thin shoulders as they sat him up and Yaone checked the temperature of his forehead with her hand and Dokugakuji tried slapping his cheek lightly to get his eyes to focus. In the end he sufficed to take the priest's gun from by his belt and press it into an unresisting hand, in a vague hope of some simple comfort from the touch. Sanzo's eyes unclouded a little at the feel of the warm metal in his palm, instinctually curled fingers around the handle as though a child clutching at some security blanket. Holding on to the only real thing he knew in the world.
"You're drugged," Yaone said too. "I think something inhaled, or maybe it was injected, or-- or scratched in. Do you know what--"
The three heard a door swing behind them and looked up to see the youkai prince Kougaiji emerge, swaying slightly and splattered in blood. The sword had even more on it.
He threw it back to Dokugakuji, who dismissed it the instant his hand clasped the handle. The blood went with it. The blood on Kougaiji's face stayed.
"It's done," the prince told Sanzo, as he approached. "I made a thorough job of it. Burned the parts. Don't worry. And we'll burn the house down too as we leave."
"Why are you doing this?"
"We saw. Isn't that enough?"
Sanzo looked from his face to Dokugakuji's. And back again. It was the same expression. Same paleness. Same tight and twitching eyes. He had to wonder what he looked like.
There was another thing also, now that they were all collected here like this, save Lirin. A flicker of a question behind each of their faces.
It was the prince that voiced it. "Where does this leave us?"
"The sutra's gone," Sanzo said. "He hid it. I don't know where. Would killing me be any fun for you still? Or is the joy gone out of it now?"
"Don't say sick things like that," Kougaiji said coldly. "We saved you and you still want to die?"
"There's nothing left."
"And that's reason for dying?"
Sanzo made a sound that on anyone else might've resembled a laugh, before it tore down into a ragged cough. "You youkai have good night vision, don't you? Look out that window back there and tell me what you see."
"We know," Dokugakuji said quietly. "We found them a few days back."
"Then you know, and don't pretend," the priest said, voice gathering a little strength now. He palmed at the gun in his hand, staring intently at the shining metal. "Just where does any of it go from here? Where can it go?"
He stood up. Kougaiji was there to hold him up as he started to fall, but the moment Sanzo had regained his balance he shoved the prince away roughly and staggered to get away.
"What do you want me to do? Go back with you? Make a nice happy ending for your team? Let your master kill me how she likes? Or maybe keep me alive as a nice little pet? Join your ranks and be your friend? What?" he demanded with an accusatory glare, continued to stumble clumsily backwards away from them. "There is no going back to normal. There is no normal to get back to. They're dead. It's over. We've all failed and your side wins."
"You're still here," Kougaiji stressed, nearing him even as the priest continued to back away. "Nothing's over yet."
"What. You think I could actually make it alone? Without them? Against you? How?!"
"You've been saying forever--"
"FUCK what I've said!" Sanzo shouted, voice hoarse and cracking. He moved his foot and landed wrong against the side, lost his balance, fell-- And Kougaiji caught him, held him up by the shoulders and steadied him close to his chest, and resisted Sanzo's efforts to break free.
He couldn't understand why he did it. He didn't know of any way to detach himself that wouldn't look even more abnormal. He did know that if he hadn't done it, no one else would have.
Eventually Sanzo's thrashing won out and Kougaiji let him free, put a good two or three feet between them.
"The game's not over yet," the prince told his enemy again. "Are you strong or aren't you? Didn't you say you wanted to beat us? Didn't you want to kill me?" He pressed his lips together, hated himself for the words forcing themselves to be said, but saying them anyway. "Don't leave so many things unfinished. They'll hate you too for doing it."
He looked up from the floor to see Sanzo's eyes on him, shaking, twitching, but unblinking and fixed.
A smile would have poisoned everything then, so Kougaiji ducked his head instead in acknowledgement. "Let's go, then. You shouldn't even be standing in your condition. It doesn't prove anything to push yourself beyond your limits," he continued, turning around and walking back toward the other two, beckoning the human to follow. "We'll get you healed up and get your sutra back and then you can be on your way. And we'll--"
clickclickclick.
"They hate me anyway."
Kougaiji froze and started to turn. His eyes fell on the metal gun gleaming in the firelight, the short barrel brought up close to Sanzo's eyes, a thumb drawing the hammer back, finger twitching with a new strength brought of resolve, drawing back on the trigger--
But there--
The prince's mind raced lightning-fast over recent memories.
--There had been two bullets in the chamber, not one. There was one last shot.
He started to yell even before the brain had caught up with him. "DON'T--"
The shot resounded like thunder. It echoed through the hall, hollow and clean and final.
New blood splattered on Kougaiji's face.
Lirin turned the corner into the dining hall just in time to see the
body of Genjo Sanzo fall dead to the floor.
And then there was nothing.
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finished at exactly: 23:56 16 November, 2004.
No bishounen were harmed in the making of this fanfic.