thenearshore | Enthusiasm (n.), orig. the state of having a god within

Entry tags:

Enthusiasm (n.), orig. the state of having a god within

Who: Gojyo (

erogappa), Kurama (

ivegotasword)
What: Retrieving a missing god
When: Forward-dated to the afternoon of May 11th
Where: Starting in Sapporo, Near Shore
Warnings: Overblown drama, suicide attempt

Sapporo, Japan

It wasn't the right restaurant. He knows his shrine, the special spot, the door to heaven, and it's in a Greek restaurant. He can't read Japanese -- not on his best day, and today is far from that -- but he knows the smell of the place by now. After this last week, he'll never get the smell of Greek food out of his nose ever again.

He shudders, leaning heavily against the chilly cement side of a towering office building. The cold shocks him awake, but it's only a temporary reprieve. Sleep is hard on his heels, sleep and him and his army -- they're lurking in every shadow, behind every corner, ready to spring the instant Gojyo closes his eyes. He can't close his eyes. Not until he's safe.

But it was the wrong restaurant. He tricked him, made him think he was in Japan, in Tokyo, on the right street the right town the right planet the right universe, but he's not. This isn't where he's supposed to be.

His foot slips out from under him, exhausted muscles failing. Without any forethought he punches the side of the building, hard enough to split the skin on his knuckles and leave a brillint red smear on the mottled grey wall. The pain helps, until it doesn't. He stumbles on.

He needs to find the restaurant. He can't go home without the restaurant, but if he heads right for it, then he will know where it is. He will learn Gojyo's secrets. If he gets to heaven, then he'll kill everyone. Gojyo tucks his bleeding hand into his stomach. It hurts. He can't remember why -- he must have been fighting. They keep trying to catch him, drag him back. He won't let that happen.

The wind whispers as it zips through the city streets, airy voices that promise a failed hunt and a swift and brutal recapture. He has to run, but running is impossible. Walking is impossible; he stumbles, catching himself on the edge of a dumpster. He can't keep going.

He'll rest then, okay. Just for a few minutes. In the alleyway behind a Layton Station, Gojyo tucks himself into a ball and tries desperately not to fall asleep.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Still half-asleep, Gojyo fights frantically with the sheets, yanking them from his body and kicking hard until he's free. Only then do his surroundings register.

"Hakkai?" He clamps his own hand over Hakkai's on his shoulder, staring hard at the man's face, waiting for it to shift into another nightmare vision. But it seems real enough. The room he's in... this is his room in the temple. "How did I get here?"

Gojyo's eyes focus as though he's seeing Hakkai, and not whatever hallucinations had tormented him before. Relief wells up into a small, reassuring smile, and Hakkai frees his hand from Gojyo's shoulder, holding it out in a silent offer to help him up.

"Kurama found you in Sapporo," he says. There's a part of him that wants to stay there on the floor, curl up around Gojyo like a climbing vine restored to its trellis, and soothe him back to sleep from the nightmare. It's outvoted, slightly, by an uneasy coalition of pride and practical concern about how much both of their backs would hurt in the morning from sleeping on the floor.

Gently, instead, he suggests, "You should rest."

He takes Hakkai's hand automatically, before his brain even catches up to the intent behind the action. Oh -- he should stand. Okay. He tightens his grip on Hakkai's hand and pulls himself unsteadily up. He's not physically injured -- he's not even physically exhausted -- but getting his arms and legs and everything to coordinate enough to stand takes more effort than it should.

He definitely needs more rest.

But he shakes his head. "I'm good." If it turns out that this is just a dream -- or a spell -- then he thinks he might actually go mad. The only way to be sure is to stay awake and in the moment, and make sure that what he's seeing is real.

He might not want to sleep, but he definitely needs to rest. He's more than a little wobbly. "Gonna sit down, though," he chuckles, dropping back heavily onto the bed. He doesn't seem to realize that he's still holding Hakkai's hand.

Gojyo's hand is still clasped firmly around his own, and Hakkai considers the awkwardness of standing next to his bed holding his hand for a few seconds before settling down on the edge of the mattress next to him. He doesn't make any effort to free his fingers. The grip is obscurely reassuring.

Not wholly reassuring, though, when he still has no idea how Gojyo might have been spirited away. When he doesn't know, he doesn't know how to stop it from happening again.

Into the silence, he murmurs, "Do you remember what happened?"

Please think about what happened to you all over again, and say it out loud so everyone can know how weak you are and what you were forced to do, Hakkai asks, and Gojyo closes his eyes. He's right. It needs to be said.

"It was an old wizard," he offers at last, opening his eyes again and fixing them on a point on the far wall. "A priest, I think. He wanted to call down a god to, I don't know. Bless his town or something." At least, that's what he gathered in the few minutes the old man had remained alive. "But he was too old, his body wouldn't bear the strain, so he summoned me to possess his grandson instead."

He can't hide his disgust at the memory of the grandson; his grip on Hakkai's hand tightens to a point where it's got to hurt. "The grandson wasn't exactly civic minded."

The shadows in the room aren't enough to soften the way Gojyo's face twists at the memories. Hakkai doesn't flinch as his grip goes from comfortable to bone-grindingly tight, watching his face instead. So it was some sort of spell. The summoning of a god, by a mortal priest -- into the body of some man who used Gojyo's power for his own ends...?

Slowly, he nods, and looks away from Gojyo's face, at that same vague area of the opposite wall that's absorbing the other man's attention. The emotion on Gojyo's face is too raw to continue intruding on, and even if Hakkai has one more question, he wants to offer that little sliver of privacy.

"Are either of them still alive?"

The power to summon a god into someone else's body, he thinks, is the kind of power it's better no mortal retain. If there's someone still living who does know how to do it, he's quite willing to solve that particular problem himself.

Gojyo doesn't need to be troubled with it.

Hakkai might have only one more question -- Gojyo shakes his head, glancning at Hakkai briefly but then looking down and away again -- but there's more that has to be said.

"It was like we were the same person." It's easier to tell this part of the story to the far wall, his face fully turned away from Hakkai's. He'd like to curse himself for a coward, but he's got too many reasons to be damned that have to come first. "I saw out of his eyes, when his arm moved mine did too. I kept forgetting it wasn't me doing those things."

And those things are the main reason he's not asleep. They're the reason he's not going to sleep much for the next several days. "He... I... we killed people. And worse." So very much worse. He can't keep holding on to Hakkai when he confesses this, not now that his hands are this filthy. "I still see them."

Gojyo lets go as he speaks, looking away, as if drawing into himself, and Hakkai's gaze shifts back to his face.

Very deliberately, he reaches over to take Gojyo's hand again.

"You didn't kill them," he says. His voice is quiet, but utterly certain. Gojyo didn't kill them; Gojyo didn't do worse to them. "You were the weapon."

He's never been forced to kill against his will -- he's never had a god who wasn't trustworthy, and a shinki can sting to defend their own conscience -- but he knows that sense of helplessness. He's been forced not to act, before, against his will. It's not as bad. It's not nearly as bad, but he still knows, in his bones, exactly why Gojyo is not to blame.

Gojyo looks down at Hakkai's hand wrapped around his own, a confused frown sketched broadly across his face. "You don't understand," he murmurs. But how can he? How can anyone really understand? He'd fought at first, sure, but only at first. How can you fight against your own hands, your own body? After those first few days, after he'd grown too tired to fight anymore, after the drugs and the sleep deprivation had started putting flickers in the corners of his/their eyes... after he had grown bored with granting quick deaths... after he'd begun to forget that they weren't one person, it had gotten easier. "It was still me." Sometimes, he'd even enjoyed it. Sometimes, he'd...

He can't stay still. Tearing himself off the bed, Gojyo paces the length of the room, hands knotting in his hair as he yanks it out of his face. He's got to have cigarettes in here somewhere, right? In a table drawer, behind the clock? Somewhere. "I need a goddamn cigarette."

"I might not understand, but I know you didn't choose to do it." Hakkai leans over to pull open the bedstand drawer. He'd found a half-empty pack crumpled in the kitchen and put it away there a few days ago. In case.

Matches he doesn't have, but he tosses the pack underhand to Gojyo regardless.

This doesn't seem like the moment to make a fuss about smoking indoors.

He snatches the pack out of midair, but he doesn't have any matches either. All his lighters have disappeared, there's none on any of the surfaces he can see... he shoves a pile of crap off the endtable, and takeout menus from a double dozen places go flying, but there's no lighter in there. There's nothing.

He spins on his heel -- fuck, he can't even manage to light a damn cigarette, how much more worthless can you get? -- and his back hits the wall. He slams his fist back into it, hard enough that the plaster creaks, and slides down into a crouch, face buried in his hands, trying to catch his breath.

The papers spin to the floor in a silence broken only by Gojyo's harsh breathing. Hakkai watches, startled still, as the seconds tick by and he tries out helpful phrases for usefulness. It's all right. It's not your fault. You're safe now. No. Worthless, all of them, and mostly false: even the true one, it's not your fault, falls dead on repetition.

Instead, at last, he gets to his feet with a whisper of fabric and crosses the room. A Domino's menu crumples under his foot as he crouches down beside him, and another glossy sheet of paper slides under his knee as it hits the floor. He reaches out to rest a hand on Gojyo's shoulder, very lightly, offering whatever comfort his presence might be worth.

Gojyo's much better at this than he is, he concludes, and the corner of his mouth tilts up at the not-really-funny-at-all thought.

He should have been stronger. He should have fought harder. He should have found some way to stop the man, should have at least found some way to warn all those people. He's a god. He should have been better. He should have saved them. His breath comes in short harsh gasps, uneven and not nearly deep enough, until he finally slaps his hand over his own mouth, fingers together like he's holding a cigarette to his lips. Only then, miming a drag off a cigarette, is he able to get his breathing back under control.

Hakkai's touch is so light Gojyo can barely feel it. It feels uncertain, distant. Like he's not really there... like he doesn't want to be there. Hell, Gojyo can't blame him for that. This is the second god Hakkai's had vanish -- he must have been so worried, and for what? For some fake drunk god who couldn't even manage to break free of a man so high he was chewing on his own hands? If he was worthy of feeling shame, this would be the most humiliating moment of his life.

...And if he keeps up acting like this, Hakkai's going to start feeling guilty, isn't he? Shit. Gojyo scrubs at his face with his palms -- he's not crying, but god, right now he kinda wishes he could -- and sucks in a chest-rattling lungful. Get it together. Quit feeling sorry for yourself.

"I should get some more sleep," he says at last.

Gojyo is back, and yet, watching him struggle to breathe, struggle to control himself, Hakkai feels as though he's still miles away. Miles away, and utterly incompetent, he corrects: this pain calls for warmth, for support and comfort.

Also, he supposes, for sleep. At this rate, the nightmare that had shaken Gojyo onto the floor just minutes ago wasn't going to be the only one.

And here he is hovering at arms'-length. Abruptly, disgusted at his own uncertainty, he leans forward to pull Gojyo into an embrace.

And then, just when he's managed to convince himself that Hakkai is only hiding his disgust out of some perverse form shinki loyalty, Gojyo finds himself crushed against the other man. He raises his hands to push Hakkai away, but his traitor body betrays him: first resting flat against Hakkai's chest, then clinging to his shirt... and then, finally, wrapping around his back and holding on for dear life.

It's like a weight's been lifted off his chest. A jaw-cracking yawn works its way free, but instead of pulling back he leans more into Hakkai, turning his face into the crook of his shoulder, flooding his senses with the other man's presence. He's back. He's safe. He'll find a way to atone for what he did. Hakkai's still here... and Goku and Sanzo too, he's sure. He was lucky, this time. There won't be a next time. He swears it.

"I'll get stronger," he promises into Hakkai's pulse, an echo of a long-ago Goku. "Will you help me?"

For a moment, as Gojyo's palms press against his chest, Hakkai thinks he's guessed wrong, that Gojyo needs that distance between them after all. He catches his breath against the sinking cold of the thought, waiting for the shove until he realizes that Gojyo's fingers are, instead, clenching in the fabric of his shirt to hold him close.

He turns his face against Gojyo's hair, taking another, deeper breath. Stronger. As if he's to blame, still... but the words seem right despite that. Strong enough that he won't be stolen away.

... Indestructibly strong. That would be enough. Hakkai's smile is invisible, in the dark, buried against Gojyo's loose hair. Perhaps he'll manage to get a little stronger in the meantime, too.

"Yes."

Gojyo just nods, not wanting to ruin the moment with words. He'll get stronger, yes. And with Hakkai helping he'll do a much better job of it than he would on his own. He's been given powers -- it's about damn time he learned how to use them. Once he's recovered -- once he's rested -- he'll go see Kurama again. And that war god, what was her name? Bitchymon? He'll take Hakkai out, and they'll fight together, side by side and as god and shinki.

And then, when he can let himself think about it, he'll figure out some way to make it up to the families of those... of those he...

Shit.

He wants nothing more than to pull Hakkai in even closer, but instead he lifts his face back, hands loosening. "Damn, this is embarrassing," he chuckles, and there's almost a thread of real humor in his tone. "You've got to be tired of lookin' after me by now."

"You can make it up to me later," Hakkai assures him, dryly, and sits back on his heels without quite yet letting go. He hesitates for a moment, considering Gojyo's face. It's still marked deeply with exhaustion.

Gojyo is right: he should rest, and not fight himself screaming onto the floor.

"May I sleep here tonight?" It's not an unselfish question. He won't be resting well in his own room, not as afraid as he is of another abrupt disappearance, and the armchair is a thoroughly terrible place to get a night's sleep.

That was clearly an unexpected question. Gojyo's eyes go wide, and he glances over Hakkai's shoulder at the bed behind him. It's certainly big enough for two -- it's big enough for four, and not even a particularly cuddly four -- but distance doesn't mean a thing to the heat-seeking. He'll end up stuck to Hakkai's side if they share the bed -- he won't mean anything by it, but it's just the way things are. And that will make Hakkai uncomfortable.

...Still. He really doesn't want to be alone.

"Uh. Yeah." It's a warm night -- he can sleep on top of the covers. Maybe that'll stop him from attaching himself to Hakkai in the middle of the night. "Yeah, no, there's plenty of room. I told you to sleep where you like, right?" he laughs, trying to dispel any awkwardness.

"That's right, you did," Hakkai says, affecting a thoughtful expression, and frees one hand to tap his chin. "My mistake. I'll remember not to ask."

A little reluctantly, he lets go to get to his feet, with a small smile flickering over his face. He'll just sleep in his clothes, rather than worry about going to find his pajamas. The comfort value of all those normal bedtime routines isn't quite enough to outweigh the fact that he's tired, and Gojyo is certainly worse off, and he can't quite muster enough energy to bother.

For all that he intended to sleep on top of the covers, once Gojyo's on his feet with the bed in his sights, he can't think of anything other than smashing his face into the pillow and pulling the blankets over his head. He smiles tiredly at Hakkai as he wobbles to his feet, giving the man's shoulder a squeeze (that is only partially about keeping his own balance).

"Good." Just five steps, and he can fall over. "This is your house too. You don't ever need my permission for anything."

It's just a few steps to the bed. Hakkai returns Gojyo's smile, and bundles up the fallen sheets in his arms, tossing them back onto the bed as he toes off his socks in a tiny nod to the getting-ready-for-bed concept.

He's asleep a solid three seconds before his head hits the pillow. With another body in the bed, the nightmares won't be nearly as bad -- he'll toss and whimper from time to time, but that'll be the worst of it -- and once he manages to octopus himself around Hakkai (all four limbs wrapped tight, and his face pressed against him too) the nightmares will cease completely.

Hakkai's startled awake when Gojyo first rolls over to wrap an arm around him, but he doesn't pull away. He doesn't, in fact, mind. It feels a little awkward adjusting to someone curled up around him, and when he wakes up his arm is going to be asleep, but it feels safe. Gojyo won't be disappearing tonight.

Sleep pulls him down only a few minutes later, and the room is quiet.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Enthusiasm (n.), orig. the state of having a god within

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject