thenearshore | Soy un perdedor [CLOSED]

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Soy un perdedor [CLOSED]

Who: Gojyo and Niles
What: Two perverts walk into a bar...
When: Evening of March 28th.
Where: Out and about in the Far Shore to start
Warnings: Niles

So, to recap: Gojyo's evening so far has been less than optimal. He got the crap kicked out of him (black eye, split lip, torn shirt, bruising everywhere visible and in a lot of the spots that aren't). He agreed to never see his best friend ever again (which would certainly explain the hang-dog look on his sorry-ass face). And he pounded back a bottle of wine on an empty stomach to try and make himself feel better about the first two points (note: it totally failed to work).

He can't go home and he can't stay here, so the solution is clearly to wander around the Far Shore and try to get into some nice distracting trouble. Maybe somebody and his friends will want to pick a fight? Or maybe he'll find a sympathetic girl who will take him home. That would be nice. He's not really holding his breath for nice, though. The way his luck is going? Whatever happens sure as hell won't be nice.

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Gojyo's head was ducked over his cold take-out like a boy waiting for a scolding, his eyes hidden behind the fall of his startlingly blood-red hair, and he didn't look up into Hakkai's half-curious and half-unsettled gaze.

Maybe he was the sensible one here.

Most likely, they were both being more sensible than Hakkai.

"Gojyo," he started, and found himself abruptly at a loss for what to do with the rest of the sentence. He didn't want to be sensible about this, but he could almost taste misery like stale smoke on the air of the room. Like Elsa's. How many people did he want to hurt groping for something he'd only half guessed he'd ever had?

His gaze slipped away from Gojyo's half-hidden face, and he turned on his heel, pulling one of the dish towels from its drawer and heading for the freezer with brisk steps. There must be something frozen in there. Ice? Vodka?

"I'm sorry for imposing on you so early," he said. Ice, it turned out. He wrapped a handful in the towel, double-twisting it, and held it out. "Please put this on your eye. It'll help with the swelling."

From behind his dirty hair Gojyo could hear Hakkai puttering around, putting together an ice pack like this was his kitchen, his things, like he had any right to be here taking care of Gojyo's swelled-shut eye. It was infuriating.

I did it with another man tonight, he wanted to snarl. Two years of nobody's hand on me but mine and I threw it all away with some fucked-up pervert because you're not my fucking wife. Stop acting like we're married. I don't even know you.

But what the hell good would it do. He slurped down the last mouthful of noodles and tossed the empty carton into the sink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and his hand on his grass-stained pants before digging a cigarette out of his pocket. He didn't take the ice. He didn't even look at the ice.

"Is she all right?"

"She'll be fine," Hakkai said, quietly, and put the ice down on the counter. Gojyo could take it if he wanted to, or he could ignore it until it melted onto his floor. His choice wasn't any of Hakkai's business, either.

Nonattachment was exactly as hard as he'd thought it would be, he noted, and he was out of things to say again.

It had seemed like such a sound idea last night, when he was full of righteous anger about them meeting behind his back to discuss him, and determined to make sure Gojyo hadn't been too badly hurt by Elsa's beating. Then he'd been annoyed enough to try back in the early morning hours. Now --

It was exactly as though he were watching a stranger grieve for him, and he couldn't even claim that he wasn't dead. He could not possibly help.

He breathed, carefully, around the lump of inchoate grief and guilt clotting his chest, brought his heels neatly together, and bowed to Gojyo in apology, exactly the way that shinki weren't supposed to for any god but their own.

He set the ice down... he folded his hands... Gojyo held his breath as Hakkai bowed, he was leaving, he was finally leaving, he wasn't sure his heart could take any more of this but it was finally going to be fine... but then he spotted something on the back of Hakkai's neck. It looked like a bruise, but darker, more even.

"She'll be fine?" he repeated, incredulously, taking a step toward Hakkai, fingers itching to pull his collar down and examine that mark. He stopped himself long before that point, body jerking as he realized what he was doing. He shook his head angrily. "Did she do that to you?"

"--Do what?" Hakkai straightened back up, startled, one hand going to the -- what was Gojyo looking at? -- the back of his neck, and flinching away as he felt the burn of blight against his fingertips.

He hadn't even noticed. He took a hasty step away from Gojyo. Elsa must be feeling it already. Painfully. He didn't know if touching the blight might spread it to Gojyo, but if the state of his fingertips was any indication, it might. He squeezed his hand into a fist, trying to calm himself down, shove that lump of pain away and get himself back to the calm that would stop the blight from getting any worse.

"No," he said, hastily, and backed another step towards the doorway. "No, I'm afraid I've done that to myself, please excuse me, I -- I'm sorry to have disturbed your morning."

If nothing more than talking to Gojyo had upset him enough to blight him so badly, perhaps he couldn't risk this after all. Perhaps that was the real danger of knowing his past. How could anyone resist grief, resentment and guilt at the thought of a life lost and loved ones left behind? How could he...?

Whatever it was, it looked like it hurt, and it was spreading. Hakkai's reaction wasn't doing anything to calm Gojyo down, either.

"What is that?" He took another step toward Hakkai, then another, hand raised uncertainly. Was it something that had been spilled on him? Did he need to wash it off, or was it, what, like a curse? There was too much about heaven that Gojyo still didn't understand -- was this something magical?

"Hakkai, please. Tell me what's going on."

Reluctantly, Hakkai slowed to a stop, one hand half-raised to guard his neck. Gojyo looked ready to reach out and investigate the blight himself, and he couldn't under any circumstances be allowed to touch it.

But if no one had explained it to him yet he did need to know. Goku had gone days before anyone treated his blight. Gojyo might not think to ask anyone for help, if his reluctance to do anything about his black eye meant anything.

"It's called blight," he said. "It's caused by touching ayakashi. It can be washed clean with holy water."

"Touching ayakashi," he repeated, trying to make the words make sense. Hakkai clearly didn't want to be touched, but Hakkai was also walking around with a big black stain on the back of his neck, so what Hakkai wanted wasn't really at the top of Gojyo's list of things to give a shit about.

He took another step forward. "But you said you did this to yourself." Did he mean from his trip to hell? Was this something Hakkai had had on him for a couple of days already? The stupid sonovabitch. "Do you need holy water?" He gestured at the center of the house, and the little fountain in the courtyard under the olive trees. "I've got holy water, go wash it off!"

Hakkai cleared his throat.

"Ah. Yes. It's also caused when a shinki feels guilt for his actions."

It might have been smoldering there since last night without his noticing, but he was sure that he'd made it worse this morning. He should have known better to begin with. He hadn't wanted to know better.

He'd also be very surprised if cleansing it here would keep it away for long, but then, it would take a while to force himself to feel better about this. Maybe Kazuma's advice about self-justification had been more sensible and less cynical than it sounded. If a shinki always had to feel righteous, then sometimes, he'd have to fool himself to feel that way.

Gojyo's hand dropped to his side, and he stared wide-eyed at Hakkai in what could only be called gut-wrenching horror.

Hakkai was hurting because Hakkai was feeling guilt? But... but Hakkai always felt guilty. He did something bad and then he stewed on it until he gave himself migraines and ulcers and now some weird kind of skin cancer he was giving himself cancer oh shit oh shit oh shit...

When the room started to pitch to the left Gojyo finally realized he was hyperventilating. "This isn't your fault!" he snapped, pressing the palm of his hand against his swollen eye. It was really starting to hurt -- he should have taken the ice Hakkai offered. "I'm a god and you're gonna fucking listen to me, all right? None of this is your fault, so stop... stop trying to make yourself sound more important than you are. I mean it."

Gojyo looked panicked, and Hakkai stepped forward with worry written across his face as he reached out with his unblighted hand -- no. No, it'd be better not to touch him with either hand right now, really. He smiled automatically, and stepped around him to pick the forgotten ice pack up off the counter and offer it back to Gojyo. With the clean hand.

"Ah ha ha, I'll try," he said. "It's not the first time it's happened. I'll be fine."

Elsa would be hurting, and he'd need to apologize, and make sure her matching blight was cleansed too. After their argument last night, that wasn't going to be a pleasant conversation, but it was probably going to be necessary.

He grabbed the ice pack and crushed it to the side of his face (it felt better almost immediately but like hell was he going to admit to that), snagging Hakkai's (unblighted) arm with his free hand.

"Will you just shut up?!" He was going to drag Hakkai to the fountain in the middle of the house, and Hakkai was not getting a say in the matter. "It's not fine. This shit is not fine, if it keeps happening it's not fine!"

Shinki could hurt themselves by feeling guilty. What the hell kind of a stupid-ass system was that? People felt guilty, it's what people did! Why should they be punished for being human? "You're gonna wash that shit off right now, you hear me?"

Hakkai stumbled, startled, as Gojyo grabbed his arm and started for the door. Oddly, it helped: helped to have that awful silent tension broken, but more, it helped that he could at least do something to alleviate this fear.

"Yes, Gojyo," he said obediently, picking up the pace to match the other man, and keeping his blight-stained hand protectively hovering over the back of his neck. "Please be careful. If you touch any of the blight it can spread to you."

"Then I'll wash it off," Gojyo retorted, pulling Hakkai through the huge drafty back hallway and into the back of the little courtyard. The light from the early morning sun was just barely visible as a line of gold at the tops of the surrounding walls; the pair of olive trees dipping over the little stone fountain in the center of the swept dirt square were still cast in the blueish light of evening.

Gojyo stomped right through the patio, up to the edge of the fountain. Only then did he release Hakkai's arm.

"Take your shirt off."

"Ah," Hakkai said, pulling up short with a quick double blink. Take his shirt off? Surely the blight hadn't gone that far. The ground here was dirt, even if it had been swept clean (and by who, Gojyo's shinki?) And, besides, he wasn't particularly comfortable stripping, not around other people, in any case.

He blinked again, and, after an awkward few more seconds' pause, nodded and reached to undo the buttons at his collar. After all, Gojyo was the one who'd told Elsa about his scar. It obviously wouldn't be the first time he'd seen Hakkai without a shirt on.

A breeze stirred the branches of the olive trees, sending a few tiny leaves down to float on the surface of the fountain. Hakkai tugged his shirt off, revealing a purple-black mark spreading down across his neck. A tiny eye, perfectly round and red, rolled in a socket just to the left of his spine, looking up, down, around and focusing on Gojyo with an inhuman interest.

Banri's ghost was an excellent manservant. When Gojyo had no other commands for him, he focused on keeping the house tidy... and since Gojyo avoided Banri's ghost as much as possible, that left a lot of time for cleaning.

The blight mark on Hakkai's neck had extended beneath his collar, and Gojyo couldn't tell if it went down onto his back or now. Obviously the solution was to have Hakkai strip. If that made Hakkai uncomfortable, well. Maybe he'd remember this next time he decided to be stupid and get himself blighted.

Hakkai's shirt came off, and Gojyo swore long and fluidly under his breath at the sight. His gaze darted between Hakkai's face and his back -- did Hakkai know what the blight marks looked like? Did he know there was something staring out of him?

Well, if he didn't know then Gojyo sure as hell wasn't going to tell him. "It's, uh. It's pretty big." There was a little copper cup chained with a long chain to the fountain's bowl, which Gojyo had wondered idly about on his first pass through the house. Who would want to drink from a fountain, he'd thought, and why did the previous owners think anyone would steal that cup and not any of the other fine things in the place? But now the cup made sense.

He scooped up a cupful of the clear, cold water, and waved Hakkai over. "C'mere. Let's get that thing off you."

"C'mere.

Hakkai folded his shirt neatly over one arm and stepped inside the range of the cup's chain, turning away from Gojyo. His blighted hand drifted up towards his neck again, and he stopped himself, putting it on top of the folded cloth to protect his other arm.

"Please do be careful not to touch it," he added, firmly, and did his best to feel guilty about nothing at all as he bent his head forward to bare his neck. "I don't want it to hurt you."

"When you say shit like that it just makes me want to touch it, you know," Gojyo grumbled, poking Hakkai firmly in the shoulder. "I'm not a fucking child, Hakkai."

Carefully, he poured out the first cupful of water over the disgusting eyeball thing growing out of Hakkai's back, making sure to dump the majority of the water right on the thing's eye. "You're the one with this guilt scar. Don't try taking responsibility for my actions if you can't even keep yours under control."

"Reverse psychology is supposed to work best on the immature," Hakkai pointed out in a helpful tone. The ache of the blight was fading. On his back, the eye closed, boiling away into a noxious purple cloud.

Maybe, he thought, he shouldn't be making fun of someone who was helping him despite having wanted him out the door a few minutes ago, but letting himself feel guilty about it would be counterproductive.

"Are you saying you wanted to me touch it? I think it's messing with your brain." Just to be safe, Gojyo poured a second, and then a third cupful of water over Hakkai's skin, ensuring that every trace of the disgusting purple eyeball thing was gone.

"Do you have that stuff anywhere else?"

"I'm saying that if warning you made you want to touch it, you may be a little childish after all."

Hakkai tried to glance over his shoulder, but he hadn't been able to see more than the edges of it to begin with. He'd have to trust that Gojyo had gotten it all. Oddly, it wasn't hard to trust him, even if Hakkai would have preferred a mirror, just to be sure. His concern had been so sincere.

He held up his hand, and said, "Just this. ... Thank you."

Just this... right, yeah, of course. Gojyo felt his cheeks heating as he stepped back with a nod, turning away from Hakkai (and Hakkai's bare chest, with rivulets of water trickling down over his musculahh shit maybe he really had gone full homo).

Quickly, he hid his discomfort behind the familiar movements of lighting a cigarette.

"Okay. Good. Don't, uh. Don't let it happen again, okay?"

Edited 2016-07-02 18:47 (UTC)

Hakkai blinked: was that really a blush he'd spotted darkening Gojyo's face for a moment? Was he less comfortable than he'd seemed with Hakkai being shirtless, or was it the thanks that had shaken him?

He pulled his shirt back on, buttoning it over the dark character inscribed on his collarbone.

"I'll do my best," he said wryly, and inclined his head. "... I should let you sleep." And he needed to get back to Elsa's temple, too. She'd have been as badly blighted as he was.

There was the sound of running water from the kitchen, then -- Banri's ghost had found the mess from Gojyo's impromptu dinner and was tidying up, as he was wont to do. Gojyo shot a dark look in the direction of the kitchen, but said nothing about it.

Once Hakkai left, Banri's ghost would be getting instructions to forbid Hakkai entrance to the house, with the single exception of needing to wash away blight.

"Yeah." If he said anything else he was going to ruin things all over again, gonna spill secrets or upset Hakkai or something else even worse. So, with a nod, he headed out of the little garden toward the back stairs, only weaving slightly from exhaustion.

Hakkai followed him: after all, he knew the way out through the house, but he wasn't familiar enough with the area to be sure he'd find his way off Gojyo's property without getting lost.

"Ah," he said, and cleared his throat, "also. If you're tired of take-out. Please consider this a standing invitation to dinner. I usually turn out to have made too much."

It wasn't exactly an accident, of course. It was just that sometimes, their students needed dinner, or somewhere to stay for the night (or the week, if it were Goku, and Susano'o happened to be missing, again.) And it also gave him an excuse to invite others. People, for instance, who he'd like to have a good relationship with Elsa. People whose home he might not want to invade as though he had a right to it, until he actually did.

Soy un perdedor [CLOSED]

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