Counterparts Part III

Chapter 11


Hakkai had done the best he could do in explaining the situation to everyone. It had been a very difficult and emotional discussion, to put it mildly. Once he had laid out the medical facts as clearly as he could, he felt there was no alternative but to come straight to the point.

“As sad as it makes me to say this, my feeling is that Gojyo is ready to leave us. I believe he is in a great deal of pain, and I’m sure his body is very, very tired. He has been as big a hero in this fight as he was in the fight that saved Sanzo’s life, but even heroes have to rest, and I believe our Gojyo has simply lost the will to fight any further. He is ready to rest, and I believe he needs us to let him go before he will do it. It’s so typical of him to be putting our needs first….”

His voice broke, and he took off his monacle and rubbed his eyes as if he was fatigued so no one could see the tears starting in them.

Yaone laid her hand on his arm as he spoke and he could feel her strong chi. He knew she was sending him comfort and strength with her touch, just as he did when healing others. She spoke after him

“I can say from my experiences in similar situations that what Hakkai says is true. People with strong spirits like Gojyo usually will not leave this world if they feel there are souls holding them here, even if it is to their own detriment to stay. They need permission from their loved ones to depart.”

Hakkai looked up at Yaone, grateful for her support.

Typical of his fiery youth, Kougaiji spoke out angrily, “what I want to know is who the hell is responsible for this, who sent that damn shikigami and why. I don’t like the idea of things like that laying in wait in my territory – that could have happened to any one of us, and it sounds like it could happen again.”

“We were totally surprised by it,” Hakkai said to him. “It came out of nowhere in that mountain pass, and when it perished there was nothing but that piece of origami left. We have no idea what its origins or motivations were other than that it seemed to go straight for Sanzo. But even that could have been random chance.”

“Sounds to me like it was after the Sutra,” Kou speculated. “Regardless, I don’t like it one bit and I plan to find out who was behind it and take care of them as soon as possible. You have my word on that.”

“Count me in,” said Goku in a deadly serious voice. He had been silent throughout the whole discussion up until that point.

“Maa, maa, talk like that isn’t going to help Gojyo,” said Yaone soothingly. “We can talk about that some other time.”

“How can I say goodbye to him now?” Dokugakuji spoke up, to no one in particular, as if he were thinking out loud. “I’ve been basically pretending he wasn’t my brother for over ten years now… nothing but fighting with him…I didn’t protect him…” His deep voice shook with emotion.

Hakkai tried to comfort him, “he knew you had your reasons, Dokugakuji. He talked to me a lot about you, and what you did for him when he was a child. You were there for him then when nobody else was, and he appreciated that very much- I know he did.”

“But he’s so young… He had his whole life ahead of him. It’s not fair!”

He hit the table angrily with his fist, then stopped himself and took a deep breath, “there are so many things I want to tell him, things we should still do together, like brothers… It’s not right… gods, I wasted so much time. I thought there would always be time later on…” He trailed off and looked down at his hands.

Everyone was silent for a moment and Goku spoke up. In a clear rational voice, sounding astoundingly adult, he said, “I think we all feel like that, Doku. It’s not fair. And we all have wasted time we could have spent better… I know I have. But all we can do now is try to do what’s best for him. Gojyo deserves better than to have to linger like this,” he gestured towards the bed, “he would hate being like this, feeling like a burden on everyone, and not being able to do the things he loved to do. He deserves better than this. We owe it to him to let him go now… because we love him.”

Sanzo had sat chain-smoking, hunkered down into his chair, mute and staring at his sandals through the whole conversation up until Goku spoke out. At Goku’s words he looked up and gazed into the young man’s eyes, wondering when and how this maturity had landed on his small shoulders, and where he had been when it had happened. He suddenly felt very, very old and so tired. He got up and walked over to his usual spot in the windowseat and stood looking out the window, his eyes not really seeing the view outside.

“So they think it’s time to “let him go”, eh? Tch. Easy for them to say… they don’t have to live with the guilt. They aren’t the ones that he sacrificed his stupid life for on the side of that mountain. They aren’t the ones that the damn kappa had spent the last *however long it had been* –how long had it been, anyway? – chasing so relentlessly, seducing, always seducing... First into his bed, and then into his heart. They don’t have to face a lifetime of knowing that they have thrown away with both hands what most people spend their whole lives looking for – someone that really loves them.”

“And he did love you, you stupid moron,” he told himself. “You can’t run from it any longer. He loved you as much as any human being can ever love any human being. Remember when he told you, that night in the tent in the rain?”

“We’d gotten those damn new tents so we could each have our own. It was your idea, Mister ‘I Need My Own Space.’ And you had been such a royal pain in the ass to everyone all day, sniping at Hakkai when he tried to be helpful, whacking the saru for simply asking questions, and biting poor Gojyo’s head off… simply for being himself. He had tried so hard all day to cajole you into a better mood, but oh no, not you.”

“So that night, with the fucking rain pouring down, and you alone in your tent feeling like death in a dress, he could have left you alone to stew in your own juices. Hell, he could have told you to go fuck yourself sideways and it would have been better than you deserved. But did he do that? No. Did he call you out on your crappy behavior and curse you for being the miserable misanthrope and cruel bastard that you are? No. Did he come in and smack you stupid with your own goddamn fan? No. He crawled in out of the rain with that big idiotic puppy dog grin on his face, and a fistful of wildflowers like a goddamned four-year-old-kid, and he had gotten soaked to the skin picking them for you, too. He handed them to you like they were the most precious gift imaginable, and kissed you like you meant more to him than anything in the world. Then despite your growling and grousing he persevered and made sweet love to you right there in your tent until your bad mood evaporated like an ice cube in a hot skillet.”

“And afterwards when he held you close and warm, and you listened to the rain hitting the tent in the cold dark night, did he give you a bad time for having been such a hard case all day? No…he told you that he loved you, and that he has loved you almost since the first day he met you. He told you that it started as far back as the day you chanted the sutra at the burned-out castle, but that he had been waiting, afraid to tell you, afraid of what you would say, that you would shut him out completely. And you might have too, you goddamn fool… He said he’d loved you all that time, and that he didn’t think that would ever change, that he would always be there for you. And he didn’t ask a damn thing in return from you, just your honesty and your respect.”

“And just what did you give him in return, this trusting soul that laid his heart bare before you out on a silver platter?… Nothing.. Not a goddamn, fucking thing. Zip… zilch… rien… nada. Unless you want to count some weak attempts at humor, and a lot of slick evasions. Oh no, not you, The Great Genjyo Sanzo… No, for you it’s ‘Since the day I was born till the day I die the only side I’m on is my own.’ So look where that high and mighty fucking philosophy of yours has gotten you now… “

“If Gojyo had really thought that way, you’d be fucking dead now- he wouldn’t have bothered to save your sorry ass… deal with that. Is that ‘philosophy’ going to crawl into your tent the next time it’s a vile rainy night and hold you close and chase away your complicated demons with simple pure love?”

An ironic smile ghosted across Sanzo’s face. “Simple…that was a funny word in relation to the damn kappa…”

In some ways, right from his birth, the hanyou’s life had been a complex juggling act just to survive – the home life with his tormented stepmother and his protective older half-brother had been a real gothic horrorshow, ending with the murder of one of the principle players by another – nothing too simple about that. But the young boy had survived, moving into the streets and a life of scams and vice far too intense and dangerous for his young age – and still he survived again. He developed a canny wit and a way with people that would make him beloved by women and liked and respected by almost all that knew him, even as he was picking their pockets. Since puberty he had chased women with the single-minded determination of a bloodhound, but by design never kept a single one that he caught, only sampled them like an oenophile at a wine-tasting. Again, simple was not a word one could ever accurately apply to Sha Gojyo.

Yet through all of his trauma and tragedy, and all his pursuit of decadence, Gojyo had never lost his childlike simplicity. He was always able to enjoy elemental pleasures, whether of the hedonistic variety, or simply the company of good friends, and he had been teaching Sanzo how to enjoy them as well. And while it would be unfair to say he saw the more complex issues of morality in black and white, he did have a knack for flitching away the layers of intellectual equivocation surrounding an issue and reducing it to its core truth. He inelegantly called it his ‘bullshit detector’ and he was very rarely wrong. Sanzo wondered what Gojyo’s bullshit detector would have to say about this current situation, about this gathered assemblage and their inclination to bid him farewell and allow him an early departure from this turn of his on the great wheel of karma.

He asked himself if he could really do it, could he “let him go?” Could he lean over that too still form on that bed and tell him goodbye? That larger-than-life soul that had wound its way so intricately around his own… how could he possibly sit next to him and calmly release him, give him permission to leave him here, all alone?

“How could that possibly be? In what world is that an acceptable possibility? And could I survive it if he did? And why should I… Is it really what he would want?… Does he truly want to leave me?… Does he really want to die?”

He knew his mind had rejected the concept of Gojyo’s death since he had first been injured. He admitted to himself he was no closer to accepting it now than he had been when he had awakened the day they had been injured, no matter how many rational arguments Hakkai and Goku made to the contrary.

During the days and weeks since the incident with the shikigami Sanzo had had a lot of time had to think about Gojyo and their time together. He had also thought about himself, and his history, with his lifetime of self-imposed isolation and solemn cynicism. He realized now that, through it all, something had shifted dramatically inside of him during this period.

He admitted to himself that he was having a much harder time accepting the loss of the kappa than he ever would have before. He knew that during Gojyo’s illness he had taken a long hard look at their time together in the context of the larger picture of their journey to the west and of their entire lives. When he looked at it all from that perspective it suddenly became obvious that it was much more important to him than it seemed when dealing with it just day-to-day on the road. Gojyo’s flirtations and pursuit of him as part of their daily life on the road had seemed annoying and trivial, and just something he could take or leave because it was always there. When viewed from this perspective and distance, he could see that it was part of something much larger and far more valuable and worthy of appreciation, something very precious which he was now very close to losing forever.

“I can’t let him go, it’s only now that it’s all starting to make sense to me. It’s only now getting through my thick stubborn skull what he has been trying to tell me all along. If he goes now we’ll never have a chance to really be together…. He’ll never know that I’m finally starting to get it…that I realized he was right…”

As he thought about Gojyo and himself an image popped into Sanzo’s head of a lotus blossom, beautiful and perfect, just starting to open. All of its potential beauty was there, just waiting to unfurl and reveal its true nature and its splendid mixture of the simple and complex, the earthly and the divine, the sacred and profane. He heard the echo in his head of a loud clear voice- it was something one of the Three Aspects had said to him as they were commissioning him with the whole journey and telling him just who he should take along. He saw the exquisite lotus blossom slowly starting to open, and suddenly its image started to fade…

Sanzo, She had said, it is time you trusted with the eyes of your heart.

Instantly Sanzo realized it as surely as the sun set in the west: whether he wanted to be or not, he was in love with Sha Gojyo, and he always would be, from this life on into the next. It was as simple and elemental in its truth and beauty as that lotus blossom.

Gojyo’s breathing had been getting more and more shallow and ragged while Sanzo had been lost in these thoughts. While he had been deep in introspection the others had discretely decided to leave him to himself, realizing that no amount of reasoning was going to mitigate the pain he was feeling or the process he had to work through for himself.

They started one by one quietly coming to Gojyo’s bedside and saying their goodbyes. Yaone held his hand and softly sang a demon lullabye to Gojyo, kissing his forehead gently before turning away. Kougaiji told him it had been an honor to share the battlefield with such a fighter, and pledged to do his best to kill the bastard behind the shikagami that had taken Gojyo’s life.

When Dokugakuji stepped to the bed the tall man was clearly overcome and at a loss for words. He held his brother’s hand and his shoulders shook as he fought back sobs. When he could speak, with his rich deep voice clotted with tears he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you this time, little bro…I’m sure gonna miss you. But you rest now, you hear?”

He moved from the bed quickly and sat at the table with his head in his arms. Yaone and Kougaiji surrounded him and comforted him as best they could.

Hakkai and Goku approached the bed together, each on one side, each took one of Gojyo’s hands. His breaths were very shallow and far apart now.

Hakkai spoke first, gently stroking his friend’s forehead as he did, “Gojyo, it’s Hakkai and Goku – we’re both here.”

Goku affected his usual cheer, “Yeah, I’m here, ya cockroach watersprite,” and squeezed his hand.

“We want you to know we’re proud of you for what you did on that mountain, and we’re proud to have been your friends in this life. And we love you…” at that Hakkai started to choke up, so Goku took over.

“It’s not going to be the same without you, Gojyo. I won’t have anyone to fight with, and I’ll probably get as fat as a pig because I’ll get all of the food now,” said Goku in an effort to help Hakkai, as well as the dying man. “Gojyo, I’m going to be lonely without you, and I want you to know you’ve been like a big brother to me, and you’ve taught me a lot, and I’ll never forget that.”

He reached up and brushed a few stray strands of crimson hair out of Gojyo’s face.

“We are all here with you, and we know how hard you tried to get better, and we want you to know it’s ok for you to let go now. I know I’ll see you again, sometime – someday we’ll all be together again. But you go ahead on now and wait for us, ok?”

Hakkai looked through his tears at this young man they had called the bakasaru for so long. When did he get so wise? He stroked his old friend’s forehead gently.

“Yes, Gojyo, Goku’s right. You just let go now, it’s alright. Everything’s alright.”

With that Gojyo took one long deep rattling breath and then a profound silence filled the room.