thenearshore | And every time I see a rose, I see her smilin' face

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And every time I see a rose, I see her smilin' face

Who: Gojyo and Sharak
What: Gojyo's got a memory back. He's not happy about this.
When: 5 Aug, 5:47am
Where: Temple of Aditi
Warnings: Descriptions of matricide

[ The rooster hates him. Gojyo is completely convinced of this. He’d thought, when he first came to Sharak’s temple, that it would be a quiet, peaceful place to get a good night’s sleep.

But he forgot to take the damn rooster into account.

Like clockwork, just a few minutes before sunrise the rooster points its megaphone beak straight at Gojyo’s room (okay, this might not actually be happening, but it sure sounds like it is!) and crows the loudest, nasal-est, sleep-disturbing-est crow that ever came out of a walking TV dinner. And then, five to ten minutes later, just when Gojyo thinks he might be able to get back to sleep… it crows again. And again. And again.

With a groan, Gojyo throws his arm over his eyes. There’s no going back to sleep, not anymore, but dammit he can at least pretend. Pretend to sleep, and pretend like he’s going to do something about that damn cock. He could turn it into soup, he thinks, roast rooster soup with green onions and ginger. Or maybe just stick with the roast part, spit it and grill it until the meat’s seared perfectly and the fat is spattering on the fire. Rooster buns. Rooster kebabs. Kentucky Fried Rooster. Garlic stuffed rooster.

He could do it, too. He could absolutely go out there, find a knife, drive it through the little bastard’s...

...Something in his gut twists hard, and Gojyo sits bolt upright, gasping for breath. What the hell was that? His brain churns –- something about a knife blade, right in front of his eyes, bright with blood and…

And the memory hits him like a truck. The woman standing over him – protecting him? -– tears running down her face and blood running down her dress. His face hurts –- Gojyo raises one shaking hand, running his fingertips over the old scars there, memory making them raw and new as his mother crumples dead at his feet. The man behind her, the man with the sword, the man with her blood on his hands... Gojyo can barely see his face, but he knows who it is. It’s his brother. It’s Dokuga-whatever.

He has a brother.

He's going to kill his brother.

Launching himself out of bed, Gojyo storms out into the temple, nearly blind with rage (and guilt, and loss, and fear). ]

Sharak!

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[Once Sharak is awake, she's awake. It doesn't matter how early the damned rooster decides to make a racket, or how little sleep she got the night before. She doesn't even bother attempting to fall back asleep after the first crow, instead just sighing and getting out of bed. Gently reminds herself that killing Aditi's pets prematurely would be shortsighted. That the rooster is just doing what roosters do. That chasing it around the hill to break the damn thing's neck would be undignified.

Instead she washes up, combs her hair with her fingers and gets dressed. Finding where she dropped her robes the night before in the dark room isn't made any less frustrating by the rooster still crowing away outside. Sharak yanks back one of the curtain walls leading outside.]

We heard you already, shut up!

[And then, like she's been hit by a sudden blow, she gasps and falls to one knee. Rage, guilt, grief- and the familiar stab of blight.]

What...

[ Doku killed his mom.

Gojyo's bare feet slap against the cold marble floors, each faint echo the sound of the blade pulling free from her chest.

Doku killed his mom.

The sound of her body hitting the ground.

Doku killed his mom.

The sound of her final, rattling gasp.

...Doku killed his mom.

Yanking back the curtain to her room, Gojyo doesn't even register Sharak's distress (or his own nudity: it's been too warm at night for clothes, sorry Sharak) as he snarls at her: ]

Did you know!? What he did?

Edited 2017-07-12 19:16 (UTC)

[There's blight spreading across her shoulders and on her hand clutching the curtain the knuckles are white. Her arms are still bare, blight creeping down them to mix with her scars. Sharak stays still for a few seconds before slowly getting to her feet. She should have expected this, sooner or later. They all have so many painful memories to remember.]

I don't know. [She turns slowly, registering Gojyo's nudity but putting it aside for now.] Who do you mean?

[Hakkai? What could Gojyo have remembered about him that's so terrible? Unless this is about the thousand youkai, but why would that make Gojyo feel guilty?]

[ His blight matches hers, although he hasn't noticed it yet. His hands are knotted into white-knuckled fists at his sides, elbows bent and muscles so tense he's trembling. The look in his eye is pure murder. ]

Your youkai friend. Doku. [ The word is a curse, in the oldest meaning of the term. ] He killed my mother. Our mother.

[Gojyo looks ready to attack, Sharak thinks. Ready to leap forward and kill her at a moment's notice. It might have been intimidating, under different circumstances.]

He what?! [No, she did not know that! Her shock is genuine and enough to distract her from her own, borrowed pain.] I- no.

["I chose to take the path of a brute. Ten years ago.” She hadn't been paying attention at the time, letting Hassan deal with the intruder. Now the words come back to her a little.]

... He told me you were his brother. That's all I knew.

Edited 2017-07-12 19:45 (UTC)

[ Her shock is real, and it's enough to shake him somewhat out of his furious daze. She's telling the truth (or she's a better liar than he suspected)... and even if she's lying about knowing what he did, the purple smears on her arms aren't faked. That's blight... and as Gojyo looks down at his own arms, he sees where its coming from.

He takes a long, shuddering breath, and lets it go. ]

He stabbed her. She died protecting me.

[ He's not calm -- he'll never be calm again -- but his fury is settling into something much colder, much more in control. He needs to find Doku, and he needs to kill him, but first he needs to wash this blight away.

Quieter: ]

Your blight. Am I doing that?

[Sharak glances down at her shoulder, not that she needs to see the blight to know it's there.]

Probably. Don't worry about it for now.

[It won't wash away properly until Gojyo deals with his current feelings. Sharak doesn't want to distract him. She can't quite reconcile her image of Dokugakuji with what Gojyo is saying. The man is an idiot who seems to have made some stupid decisions in his life, but he seemed sincere about loving Gojyo. That he killed a woman isn't shocking- that he killed his mother while she was protecting Gojyo is.]

Is that all you remembered?

[ He's hurting her. Shit. ...Also he's naked. Gojyo uncurls his fists and cups his hands over his junk, breathing evening out, tension easing. From the outside, he looks as though he's calming down. But inside he's still a maelstrom of rage and self-loathing. ]

Isn't that enough? [ Who cares what his reasons were? Who cares that he was a kid himself -- he couldn't have been more than eighteen? What he did was unforgivable. ] He killed her. She's dead. Now I'm gonna kill him.

[From the outside, he's fine. But the bond between god and shinki means that can't fool Sharak. Absentmindedly, she picks up the towel she'd used to dry off after washing and throws it at Gojyo. Cover up, idiot.]

Is it? [Sharak is mentally revising everything she knows about Dokugakuji. Back home, Gojyo and the others had seemed to think well of him, for an enemy. They'd been surprised by his lord's underhanded tactics, at least. They'd fought him plenty of times and hadn't killed him yet- surely if there was a feud like this between the brothers, Dokugakuji would have been killed already.

But he'd said so himself, and Hassan had recounted it to her later. He was a "brute".]

... You want to kill him?

[ He catches the towel one-handed, keeping another modestly over himself until he needs his second hand to wrap the towel around his hips. ]

You want to stop me? [ The blight on her arms is terrible, but Gojyo doesn't let himself look away. If it comes to it, he'll simply demand that she revoke his name. ...Maybe he should do that anyway, because he doesn't see this feeling going away any time soon. ] He killed my mom, Sharak.

[She's already seen your dick, Gojyo, and she's not particularly intrigued by it. You don't have to worry about your modesty.]

I'm not going to stop you. [Maybe make disapproving faces at him, but not actually stop him.] He killed your mother, what you do is up to you.

[It's a family matter and she's not Gojyo's keeper. And whatever the others think, Dokugakuji is hardly a friend.]

But, in my experience, revenge rarely takes the pain away.

This isn't about my goddamn pain. [ The snarl is back, but his tone is more annoyed than anything. ] This is about fixing a problem I didn't even know existed until just now.

[ It must be his most important memory, he thinks. Why else would it have been the one thing to break through whatever blocks the higher-up gods put in place inside his head? ]

If you're so concerned about pain then take your name off me, so you don't have to feel it anymore.

A problem you didn't know existed until ten minutes ago and still don't know the details of. This isn't something that should be rushed.

[Sharak puts her hand on Gojyo's shoulder to turn him around and guide him out of her room.]

I'm not taking the name off because you loved your mother, idiot. We'll wash this shit off, then you can think about what you want and how you're going to get it.

[ Gojyo's lousy poker face doesn't do shit to hold back the wave of grief at you loved your mother. ]

There's nothing to think about. [ But he lets himself be steered, more out of obligation for her blight than anything (and also, now that he's calmed down some, shame at bursting into her room stark naked). ] That asshole's been pretending to be my friend all this time, when he...

[ He has to take a deep breath, to steady himself. He doesn't know if he's going to cry or put his fist through a wall, and this isn't the place to find out. He'll find Doku soon enough.

...Ah, and there's more of that old self-loathing guilt. ]

He must've been comin' after me and she got in the way.

[Sharak leads Gojyo out of the room and through the temple towards the holy water outside, bare feet quiet on cold marble.]

... For what it's worth, I don't think he was pretending. [She can't speak for the past, of course, and there is the fact that he's been fighting with Kougaiji all these years. She never asked for his reasons.] Or if he was, he fooled me too.

[If that makes him feel better.]

[ Being outside and naked except for a towel in the cool pre-dawn morning is certainly a new experience It's not one he ever wants to repeat. ]

So maybe he regretted it. [ Not that Doku's imagined guilt will stop Gojyo from doing what he has to. ] Maybe when he got older somebody took him aside and slapped him enough times until he got over his thing about hanyou. [ Because that was surely the reason, wasn't it? Why Doku had attacked him?

There's a couple birds in a distant tree just starting to sing. It's going to be a beautiful day, Gojyo's black mood aside. ]

She was a youkai. My mom. Means the one who... [ Wait, no. Is that really how he wants to phrase it? ] Means my father was human. [ Did Doku kill him, too? He half-turns to Sharak. ] You're sure he never told you any of this?

[It's always a beautiful day at the temple. After a few months of clear skies, Sharak is getting sick of it. If she were the kind of priest inclined to pray, she'd ask for rain.]

Maybe. [It's possible. Sharak pushes Gojyo to sit down by the pond and grabs a bucket from next to the pump, fingers twitching slightly before she makes herself keep ignoring the blight.] Or maybe he had a different reason for killing her.

[Though he certainly wouldn't have been the first person to try and kill a kid for being hanyou, Sharak knows.]

I think you're imagining that I'm a better friend of his than I am. [How much did he tell her?] ... He told me you were his brother, that he cared about you and he implied there was some messed up shit in your family. I didn't push for details.

[ He's not happy about that, but it makes sense. "I killed my mom because she got in the way of me trying to kill my freak taboo little brother" isn't exactly the kind of thing he can imagine coming up in casual conversation, not even with... with whatever their relationship had been. Human priest and youkai? ]

So how did...? [ But his question's cut off with another jolt of blight-ish something, only this time it's the something that twists his guts into tight little painful knots when he tries to remember things he's not allowed to remember. ] ...Fuck!

[ This shit is so unfair. ]

I hate this!

[You'd be amazed at the kind of company some human priests keep, Gojyo. Or maybe not, considering the company Sharak's been keeping lately.]

He- [Ow. Sharak has filled the bucket with cold, holy water by now and started moving back towards Gojyo, but when that sting of fresh blight hits her she stumbles and spills some of it onto him. Whoops. Time to sigh, try to make that look like it was on purpose, and just pour the water directly onto his blighted shoulders and back.]

It's bullshit.

Edited 2017-07-18 00:20 (UTC)

[ She pretends to stumble, and Gojyo jerks bolt upright as the cold water hits his bare skin. At least let him get his hair out of the way first, dammit! Now it's gonna be cold and dripping... a trickle runs down the middle of his back and he can't help but shudder. ]

Fuck. ...Tell me how you really feel, why don'tcha?

[ It's working, though, the water and the distraction both. He wipes the water out of his eyes, and tries to crane his neck around far enough to see if she's gotten all the blight off. He can't think about how Sharak knows Doku, can't think about how any of this makes sense, and can't think about Doku's motivations. But that's fine, because his motivations don't matter. Only his actions matter.

Anger doesn't cause blight. He'll just be angry, that's fine. ]

How's it look?

[Gojyo should just accept that he's going to be soaked for the time being. Here's where barging into Sharak's room naked actually pays off.]

It's almost gone. [She pours some more water directly onto his lower back to clear up some missed patches.] So long as you don't do anything to make it come back, you'll be fine.

[Well, he'll be fine either way. Until it gets bad enough to need an ablution, she's the only one who feels it.]

[ Yeah, he's feeling real lucky right about now. ]

I'm workin' on it.

[ No guilt: anger. No guilt at his mother dying to protect him: anger at the brother who made that action necessary. He lets himself imagine slamming a fist right into the middle of Doku's stupid braying face... and then again, for good measure. He has to make sure he's not feeling guilty any more, right?

His towel's beginning to slip with the weight of the water, and he unselfconsciously turns his back to Sharak and wraps it tighter around his hips. He can be embarrassed about his behavior after she's no longer suffering. ]

Lemme help you with yours.

[She can feel the anger, and she's not sure she's glad for it. It's better than guilt, but she's not sure by how much. She supposes Gojyo processing his grief in a healthy way is too much to hope for. Still, she isn't his mother. She can't tell him how to feel.]

I can handle it myself.

[But while the blight has creeped out onto her shoulders and arms, the majority of it is still on her neck and back, hidden under her high-collared shirt. She turns away from Gojyo and crouches down next to the water, pulling her shirt off over her head and revealing her bare, blighted back.]

This isn't the first time I've had to deal with this crap.

[ Well damn, if she was looking to shame him into silence, she found the trick. Not even the revelation that Sharak goes braless is enough to stop the jolt of guilt as Gojyo turns his back fully to her once more, offering at least the pretense of privacy. ]

If you'd stop pickin' up strays this wouldn't be a problem.

[She wasn't trying to shame hi, but if that's what it takes to shut him up she'll take it. Sharak tenses up at the stab of guilt, but ignores it in favour of splashing holy water onto her shoulders and neck.]

They warn you not to feed stray animals, right? [It's strange, having something that feels like a scar but can be washed off so easily, she thinks. The normal ones are preferable.] I should have listened.

[ From the other side of the temple comes the raucous caw of that damn rooster, and just like that the tension is dispelled.

Well, no, Not just like that. It's gonna linger for awhile yet, but being mad at the feathered alarm clock makes it easy to pretend, for now, that everything's going to be fine. ]

Feed me that little asshole, and we'll call it good.

[ He dares a glance at her bare back, and frowns at the lingering traces of blight. He never had this problem with Ekko, poor kid, and thank god for that. Maybe being attached to Sharak now, as her shinki, is why his memories are returning? If this is what memories do, then he's seriously grateful that he didn't remember a damn thing when Ekko was still here. ]

You've still got some on your shoulder.

You're a grown man, go kill your own breakfast.

[Sharak continues to be a terrible monk, shocking no one. She splashes some more water onto her back, but that still leaves spots of blight.]

I said I can handle it.

[Just dump a bucket of water on her head, Gojyo, call it payback.]

[ If he dumps a bucket of water on her head she may kill him. He's still working out boundaries here okay. Naked tantrum = acceptable, apparently, but this is, uh...

Oh, dammit. ]

No, higher up. You've still got some.

[ Dammit. ]

No, here. [ It's not a bucketful of water, just a double palmful, and it dissolves the biggest remaining patch of blight into disgusting rivulets. There's no way that's good for the grass. ]

[If he's hesitating to approach a naked woman because she's a naked woman, that's the more offensive aspect as far as Sharak is concerned. Still, she tenses up when Gojyo comes closer, even as the blight melts away and lessens the pain.]

... Thanks.

[Boundaries are important with shinki, especially on their own end. But Gojyo's been pretty good lately about not treating Sharak any differently for her gender. She forces herself to relax. There's nothing wrong with this.]

[ Of course he's treating her different because she's a woman. Of course he is. This has nothing to do with strength or intelligence or ability -- this is about naked body parts, and who is allowed to look at them. He's a dude and she's a lady that he's not dating, so the right course of action is pretty obvious.

That course of action? Keeping his back to her for the rest of this conversation. ]

Just hit me or somethin' if this happens again, okay?

[She's not a woman, she's a Sanzo. Still, it's probably a good idea not to look anyway.]

I'll hit you when I feel like hitting you. [Clear of blight, for the moment, Sharak gets to her feet.] Try not to flinch when I do, or I'll be embarrassed for you.

[Okay, she's starting to put her shirt back on, it's probably safe to turn around.]

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And every time I see a rose, I see her smilin' face

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