thenearshore | You promised me heaven then put me through hell

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You promised me heaven then put me through hell

Who: Sha Gojyo and the Kenren formerly known as General
What: WINE GOD PARTY
When: Afternoon/evening of 6 April
Where: Villa Dionysus
Warnings: ah ha ha ha will update as needed

Apparently he was just blessed. He had blessings coming out his ass (not that it was getting used for anything else lately) -- not an hour after he left the school and returned to the Far Shore, the place was attacked by a whole flock of ayakashi. Or maybe a wizard... reports hadn't all been the clearest. Monsters, that was the important part. Monsters attacked the place he'd just left, the place where all his friends, old and new, were holed up without him. As if he hadn't been feeling worthless enough as it was, fuck. And some guy had identified him not only as a youkai but as a fucking kappa and dredged up all kinds of feelings he'd thought he'd put aside as a child, and something was going on with Sanzo that he hadn't had a chance to poke into, and Elsa had basically accused him of forcibly enslaving Sanzo, and that wasn't even touching the creep who'd known he was a hanyou. Fucking blessed.

Gojyo shuddered, tossing back another swig of wine. There was something seriously wrong with that guy. He'd have to remember to tell Sanzo and Hakkai about him... somehow. Maybe he could send them a letter. Dear shit monk and Hakkai, please take notice of some scary asshole named Ni Jenny who knows things that I can't talk about because they might kill you, love Gojyo. Yeah. Brilliant idea.

At least he had plenty of wine to drown his pathetic sorrows. Gojyo drained the dregs of the one bottle (a red, so dark it was almost like drinking jam and it left a sour taste on the back of his tongue) and reached for another. His too-big house felt even bigger when he was the only soul inside (Banri's ghost was probably somewhere, but he tried hard not to think about that). "FUCK!" he yelled, just to hear his voice echo off the far wall. It didn't really make him feel better, but at least it didn't make him feel any worse? "FUUUUUUUUCK!"

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They smoke the same brand, huh? Well of course they do! Hi-Lite is the best cigarette, and Kenren's clearly got good taste. He wouldn't smoke something nasty like a Marlboro -- that would just be wrong!

"Oh yeah? Does yours sneak up on you too?" He takes another swig of his wine, and makes a face. The golden one is pretty, but it's really sweet. It's got fruit in it, he thinks... or fruit other than the grapes. Peaches, maybe. "I woke up a couple times in th'middle of the night and the asshole was just standin' over my bed." It still creeps him out, just to think about it. "I almost killed him right then and there."

Back in Heaven Kenren had never been able to stick with the same brand of cigarettes for too long; he'd always just smoke whatever he could get his hands on while they were on missions down Below. His current job made things much easier, though, and he'd developed a taste for Hi-Lites.

"What the hell, no." No wonder Gojyo called him asshole. Seemingly lacking a will of their own was creepy enough to Kenren. "Have you tried telling him not to do that...?" Hey, it was worth asking.

Gojyo just snorts. "Yeah, thanks mom, I hadn't thought of that." The wine is still too damn sweet, but he's too lazy (read: drunk) to bother searching for a better bottle right now. "He follows orders okay, I guess, so I can tell him to leave, but..." But it's complicated, okay.

"I don't like tellin' him what to do. He's a creep and he used to be worse'n that, but still. It doesn't feel right."

Kenren's eyebrows arch up at that. "Wait, is he someone you actually know?" Awkwaaard. "Sorry, man." The more Kenren learns about Gojyo, the more the state of this room makes sense.

For what it's worth, he is doing his best to catch up with Gojyo's state of drunkenness, and he doesn't seem to mind the sweetness of the wine nearly as much. The problem is that when you're Kenren, your alcohol tolerance tends to be higher than the average person's; he idly wonders if he should have warned his host about that.

Judging by the number of bottles, both empty and full, that are lying around? Call it a good guess that Gojyo's used to heavy drinkers. If they manage to dry out the room they're in there's still plenty in the cellars!

"Hey, don't be! I've still got all my brains in my head, right?" He drops his cigarette into his newly emptied bottle, which has just been designated his personal ashtray for the evening, and immediately reaches for his pack to light another one. "That asshole left me for dead once. I'm callin' this karma."

"Were you...?" Friends is not the word Kenren wants to use here, but clearly it couldn't have been just some random acquaintance. You don't get complicated feelings from people you knew in passing.

After brief, but evident pause he settles for "... associates?"

Gojyo chokes on his cigarette. Just a little. "Were we what? Goddamn, Kenren.

"No, fuck, we weren't associates." The hell is an associate anyway? That's, like, business partners, right? Only the suit-and-tie kind of business, not the kind Gojyo got involved in. "We did some jobs together, that's all. He slept on my couch sometimes." He waves generally at the door Kenren entered through. "Kept breakin' the damn door."

Doing jobs together and sharing a roof sounds very much like associates to Kenren, but that's okay. It's not his place to discuss the nature of a relationship he wasn't even involved in.

"Right, right. Well, it doesn't sound like he breaks your doors anymore?"

"No, he fixes 'em," Gojyo mutters into his drink, downing a throat-wrenching gulp. He doesn't miss the old Banri -- he doesn't. The old Banri would have killed him and taken over his house by now, and he knows it. The old Banri made him angry -- the new Banri is just pathetic, and somehow? That's a million times worse.

But at least they'd assigned him an empty shell and not a person to be his personal weapon-slash-servant. That would have been the worst thing of all. Gojyo regards Kenren blearily, and gestures with the butt of his wine bottle.

"They give you a shinki yet?"

Oh.

Oh booooy.

Technically, yes? There was that woman who sounded very much like Gojyo's Assho—no, that's not right, Gojyo's shinki. But he could guess Gojyo was talking about a proper shinki, like the ones he'd met at the school on his first day. People who had passed away, who remembered nothing about their previous lives and who were now here serving a god because Amaterasu or someone had decided that's what their souls would get to deal with.

In which case, well, Kenren did have one, now? Sanzo had made him name him during their fight and that meant Sanzo was now "his" or something, right?

Except... how do you go about telling your possible future reincarnation that their friend who doesn't remember them anymore is now a weapon you can use? How, when Gojyo seemed to have so much on his plate and when this was supposed to be a relaxing night?

You don't.

"Uh... no, not a proper one, if that's what you mean."

'They' hadn't given him Sanzo. Sanzo had given himself to Kenren. There was a clear difference.

"Aw, man." Gojyo sits up at that, and gives Kenren a sympathetic look. "You're stuck with a creepy one too? That sucks."

Still, could be worse. They could be shinki.

"All this shinki stuff is fucked up anyway," he continues, gesturing grandly with his cigarette. "You know, when you name one of 'em... Not one of the creepy ones," he clarifies. "One of the real ones. When you name 'em, when you make 'em into a gun or a sword or whatever, they make you see some made-up death fantasy about 'em." He takes another swig, to wash the memory away. "What the hell kinda god would do that?"

The moment Gojyo starts going on about the shinki's deaths is the moment, Kenren decides, when it's time to finish off this bottle. He still has a bit over half of it left and he has no experience chugging wine, but there's always a first time.

"Ahhh..." He nods, coughing to clear up the hotness in his throat. "Yeah, I heard something like that. S'just plain cruel." Like most things in this place, really.

Gojyo sounds firmly convinced that it's all a fantasy, though... and a tiny voice tells Kenren he might not be wrong. He saw Nataku when he named Sanzo, after all. That might as well have been his own brain supplementing the whole death-fantasy sequence to make him feel worse.

"More wine." He stretches out his hand towards Gojyo.

He heard something like that? Or he's already seen it? From his reaction it's the latter... and Gojyo can't help but wonder if it was the marble bitch, Tenpou. Or Konzen, whichever his name was. The pretty blond who looked like somebody had carved an effigy of Sanzo.

"Sure," he nods, blindly fishing a bottle out of the crate at his feet and passing it over. There's a corkscrew on the table, uh... somewhere. And Gojyo also nudges the crate with his foot. "Help yourself. There's more'n enough."

Had he had to watch his friend die? If so, then it was important that he knew... "Hey, I meant it. The shit they show you when you nora somebody, it's not real. The one I saw?" He shakes his head. "Couldn't be real, 'cause I wasn't there!" Unless Amaterasu had taken some of his memories, too. Unless he couldn't trust his own eyes anymore.

"So if, y'know... if you ever have to fight with a shinki, and you see somethin'? It's not real."

"Thaaa~nk you." Kenren takes the bottle and nods appreciatively at the dark color of the wine. Yes, mixing should help speed things up, or at least that's what he hopes. He manages to locate the corkscrew after scanning the table for a couple of seconds (it had rolled under an empty pizza box) and gets to work without wasting time.

"Hah," he says, dryly. "I'll keep that in mind." Gojyo was a genuinely good person and Kenren wasn't sure how to handle him. 'Hey, idiot, aren't you the one who needs reassurance here?', he wanted to ask. Kenren could only hope that saying these things out loud helped Gojyo deal with them.

"Mmm," Gojyo nods, sucking contentedly on his cigarette. If Sanzo's twin had tried to get out of heaven, he'd probably come to a bad end -- Gojyo can't image that any version of heaven would be happy about people trying to escape, especially not people who were trying to steal heaven's one and only weapon... just like he can't image any version of Sanzo dying easy. Not if Pretty Boy is -- was -- anything as like to Sanzo as he seems to be to his twin.

"Hey, what's that guy's name, anyway?" he blurts out, before his brain can tell his mouth that it's a bad idea. "The pretty one."

Edited 2016-07-26 03:09 (UTC)

"The pretty one..." Kenren was in the process of uncorking a third bottle, since he could tell his motor coordination would start degrading soon. Which one's the pretty one? If you asked him, he'd say both Konzen and Tenpou are pretty—just different flavors of it. Konzen is pretty like a painting, or like a carefully put-together flower arrangement, or like a bride's pearl necklace. Tenpou... Tenpou is pretty like a brand new bottle of Scotch, or like the sharpened edge of a blade, or like the moment of the day right before the sun sets.

"Uh... Glasses or heels?"

Gojyo pauses, bottle halfway to his mouth. The blond hadn't worn glasses (that he remembered, anyway), but he hadn't exactly been checking out his shoes either. More to the point, did that mean that both of the guys Kenren had tried to flee heaven with were here?

"The blond one?"

"Konzen," he nods. "The one with the glasses is Tenpou, for the record. They're both gods."

He really, really, didn't want to start talking about this again, things could get very depressing very fast, but Gojyo deserved to be up to date.

"They're already aware of what happened with Goku and not to mess with your group," that part was important too.

This is absolutely mind-blowing. It's strange enough that his entire team is here -- including Sanzo, who hadn't been with them when the rest of them had been so badly injured. Strange enough that they're all here together when so many others had been brought in -- as far as they knew, anyway -- by themselves. But now Gojyo's double is here, with his entire heaven-escaping team?

It's too much. It's too big a coincidence.

"How come you've got my face?!"

That... is not the question he meant to ask. Whatever, it's out in the open now. "An' why's that Konzen guy look like Sanzo? What's up with that?"

Kenren exhales loudly and throws his head back so he's now staring at Gojyo's fancy ceiling. He didn't want to start talking about this again. But with Gojyo's current state of drunkenness, it was bound to keep happening.

"Look, this is only a theory, okay? Think very hard about that first. S'juuust a theory we came up with."

A very solid one, though, to the point where Kenren had started taking it as a fact, but Gojyo didn't need to know that.

"We might be your previous incarnations," he says, as casually as possible, then sits upright in his chair again to resume chugging wine. These two actions were completely unrelated, of course.

Gojyo just blinks. "Previous incarnations," he repeats, as though the words have no meaning for him. And let's be fair, they don't. He knows about reincarnation, sure... in principle, anyway. Do bad shit, come back as a bug of some kind, do good shit and get a reward. But it's a little different when it's you being reincarnated. Or having been reincarnated, whatever.

"Wait, so..." He'll get his head around this, honest. Just give him a minute. "You died, and whoever's in charge of this stuff decided that you should get reborn as me." Nailed it! And he's not even slurring.

He looks horrified, though. Because Kenren died fighting heaven, right? That's not the kind of thing that heaven would consider to be 'good behavior'. That's probably about as bad of behavior as you can get, so... Kenren was apparently reborn as a bug? Or more specifically, a cockroach. "I'm your punishment?"

He groans and pinches the bridge of his nose to try and force himself to focus, but his body heat and the way his fingertips are starting to feel mildly numb are the clear signs that he's well on his way to drunkenness. Great! What a great conversation to have in this state!

"I said it's only a theory." He inhales, then calmly (carefully) deposits his cigarette stub in the bottle Gojyo has been using as an ashtray. "Anyway... it'd be more accurate to say you're gettin' punished because of me."

How else could they explain the fact that Gojyo's group had been assigned to stop one of the biggest threats Heaven had ever faced all on their own?

"No, that's what I said," Gojyo protests, leaning drunkenly half over the table, fumbling over the trash there. He sweeps it to the side with an annoyed jerk of his arm, sending empty bottles and a takeout container to the floor.

"I'm... me, my life." He slaps his chest, hard. "My whole goddamn life, and you're sayin' it's sucked because of somethin' you did?"

Kenren cringes as he hears the bottles hit the floor, but he never stops looking Gojyo in the eye. It was probably silly of him to have assumed that his only punishment for rebelling against the entirety of Heaven was to stop Gyumaoh's resurrection now, but the truth is he didn't regret his actions. Not even one bit.

"... Assuming you really are my reincarnation? Yeah. You can blame it all on me."

Sorry, but he wasn't going to say sorry.

Un-fucking-believable. Who the fuck would do something like that? To a kid? Fuck, so his whole fucking life, his mom and dad, and then his other mom, all those years alone... and it worked out okay in the end, sure, but what the hell kind of monstrous fucking gods would--

And then Kenren's words register, and Gojyo nearly falls over with how hard he's shaking his head.

"Wha... I'm not gonna blame you, asshole!" He jabs a finger at the ceiling. "It's those bastards who did it, right? Tried to make Goku fight, an' killed, you, an' made me half." The gods save nobody -- he's got to remember to tell Sanzo about this. "Th'fuck would I be mad at you for?"

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