Strangers on a Train

Author’s note: First, apologies for how long it has taken me to get this out – I have had a couple of people ask recently about it, which I really appreciate. I am amazed and honored, considering how long it has been since I posted Chapter Three, that any of you even remember it! Most of this year has been a train wreck, but (hopefully) life seems to be settling down now, and I should be able to get the rest of the story out in much shorter order.

Second, and this will make sense after you read it, let me explain that I had the bulk of this chapter mapped out and written long before I had ever read anything but maybe the first chapter or two, if that, of Reload 9 (I am always SO behind, it’s just really sad.) When I finally read the whole thing, I kind of freaked out, and considered re-writing or even totally scrapping this chapter. But since to do so would pretty much have decimated what little planning I have in my head for the whole course of the story, I just decided to leave it as is. But I did want my readers to know that this did come to me, in this form, long before reading Reload 9, not after. Honest.

Chapter Four

The first evening on the train, after Gojyo left him, Sanzo slept soundly: a deep, dreamless sleep lulled by the rolling of the train, the unceasing rhythm of the iron wheels rocking against the endless ribbons of steel.

Gojyo wandered in around midnight, a little the worse for wear from imbibing the better part of a bottle of Mongolian vodka in the dining car in an attempt to take his mind off of both his roommate and his worries, despite having been forewarned about the liquor’s toxic affects by the server.

The inebriated hanyou arrived, precariously carrying a tray with two cups of hot tea that the dining car steward had pressed on him before shooing him out. He had been assured that the tea would guarantee him of no hangover in the morning, and that he and his roommate both would sleep much better for having consumed it. Knowing all too well how Sanzo frequently had trouble sleeping, Gojyo had happily taken the extra cup, just in case the pissy monk happened to be awake when he returned.

Which, in point of fact, Sanzo was, albeit a bit a bleary-eyed and cranky, as he sat up having a smoke, with his newspaper slung out loosely across his lap.

“Where the hell have you been?” he growled as Gojyo set the tray down carefully, having already spilled a good third of the cups’ contents on the small tray during the trip from the dining car.

The kappa waved his hand airily at his grouchy roommate, and tried his best fight the slurring that somehow kept creeping into his speech.

“Hey, hey, now. Don’ bite the hand that feeds you. Or teas you. Or whatever. Anyway, I come bearing gifts. Or gift.” Frustrated, he tried to simplify his message. “I brought you some tea. Suppose’ to help ya sleep.”

“Good,” the blond snarled, “because thanks to your letting me go to sleep in the fucking middle of the day, I’ll never get back to sleep now.”

Gojyo smiled, his eyes half-lidded as he remembered.

“But you looked sooooo cute, Sanzo, like a little kitty-cat or something, all curled up and sleepy-eyed…” He grinned happily. “Like Betty. Remember Betty? You looked like…”

“Are you trying to get shot, or are you just that drunk?” Sanzo snapped, cutting him off before he could dig either of them in any deeper with his foolishness.

“Heh.” Gojyo fought back a giggle as he slouched into the seat next to Sanzo, nearly making him spill his tea. Sanzo hunched over his tea protectively and scowled as Gojyo made the giggling sound again. “Heh heh heh.”

“What the hell is it now? I suppose you expect me to ask you what you find so fucking humorous. Like I give a rosy red shit.”

“Aw, c’mon, don’ be that way, Sanzo-sama,” Gojyo cajoled, suffused with a renewed sense of camaraderie and good humor nurtured by the spirits he had consumed. “Can’t a frien’ tell another frien’ he thinks he’s cute when he’s sleepin’ without the frien’ getting’ all bent out of shape, an’ all?”

A beaming smile split Gojyo’s face as he continued. “I mean, you were really cute. I mean, we’re talkin’ fuckin’ greetin’ card cute, Sanzo... We’re talkin’, ‘warm a gran’ma’s heart’ kinda cute… We’re talkin’, little puppies an’ kitties, an’ those kids with the huge eyes kinda cute, ya know, like in those pictures?...”

He waved his hands around, gesticulating wildly, attempting to add imagery with his flails to compensate for what he seemed to be so inadequately communicating with his words, but the only effect was that Sanzo backed even further away from him on the seat, giving him warning glares, and looking even more likely to shoot him at any minute.

The grisly sound of Sanzo’s teeth grinding against each other was growing louder and louder as Gojyo prattled on, audible even over the drunken kappa’s ramblings and the constant rumbling sounds of the train.

“Gojyo!!!” Sanzo barked abruptly, his last taut nerve finally snapping.

Gojyo’s jaw slammed shut in mid-sentence, and his eyes cut sharply to view the dangerous clouds lowering in his roommate’s now-dark-purple eyes. Even in the halfbreed’s drunken haze he knew it was time to just shut up, if he valued his life, so he grabbed his cup of tea, and slumped down in his seat, resolving to be a good boy.

They rode together in relative silence for several minutes, sipping their tea, and when their tea was finished, even sharing a smoke together, with no further words being exchanged. Sanzo reveled in the blissful quiet. Until…

“Heh…”

“THAT’S IT!” the monk exploded. “Take your shit and get in that fucking room and lock that goddamn door and I don’t want to see you or hear one single word from you until tomorrow morning – late – and I don’t want to EVER, and I mean EVER – hear one fucking word about ‘cute’ or goddamn puppies or kitties from you ever again. I mean EVER. Do you fucking hear me, Sha fucking Gojyo? Or so help me, by all the gods and goddesses, I will shoot your fucking ass, then cut you up into tiny little pieces, and then throw your body off this train, bit by bit, all the way to Chang’-fucking-an. Only the vultures will know what happened to you!!”

He stood up to deliver his tirade, looming over Gojyo, who slid further and further down into his seat during the angry rant by the red-faced monk. The still-grinning kappa was quieted, but not truly cowed. At the word “vultures,” Gojyo sat up smartly, suddenly remembering the birds on the wire and the dark presence he thought he had seen, which he had resolved to tell Sanzo about, hours earlier when it had happened.

“Ooh, ooh, Sanzo! Listen! Listen! There were these birds!...”

“OUT!”

“No, but really, Sanzo…”

“OUT!”

Cutting him off completely, Sanzo pulled him up by his collar and manhandled him towards his door. Gojyo turned around, his hands held up in a gesture of appeal, and tried again.

“But, Sanzo, I jus’ wanna tell ya…”

“OUT!”

Sanzo shoved him all the way into his room, completing the process with the final application of a tabi-covered foot to Gojyo’s behind.

“No, but, Sanzo, jus’ listen…”

“OUT!”

Sanzo slammed the door, locked it, and sat back down on his couch, where he began rubbing his temples. He found he had a throbbing headache: a headache so bad, and yet somehow so familiar that he decided to give it a name.

“Gojyo...” he muttered.

**********************************************

The huge dark birds hovered over Sanzo as he ran across the open field, much closer overhead than such creatures normally circled, making him feel very vulnerable. The priest was feeling more and more uneasy, the nearer they got, almost like the birds knew something he didn’t, and he tried to run faster, feeling an increasing need to escape them now.

The slow sweepings of their heavy black wings as they glided in their gradually-tightening circle made a quiet “shooshing” sound, soft but getting steadily louder, that caused a constriction in his throat that he had to swallow hard against. He fought against the panic that was rising in his chest and forced his legs to pump faster, feeling the burn in his thigh muscles, and the sharp pang of a stitch blooming under his ribcage.

He felt for the Smith & Wesson to fire off a few rounds to scare them off, and realized to his acute dismay he had neither the gun nor the Sutra to protect himself with. His brain raced as he realized just how vulnerable he was, out in the open like this, alone against this congregated force of the darker side of nature.

He tried to think rationally, but the mostly what he felt was pissed-off: how the hell had this happened? And since he was fairly sure he would never have gotten himself into a situation like this, then goddamn it, whoever the fuck’s fault it was, Sanzo made a mental note to see to it that they suffered a slow and painful death, when he caught the guilty party.

He craved a smoke like holy hell but knew it would just have to wait, and as he struggled to suck enough air into his spasming lungs as he ran, he could just hear Hakkai’s chiding voice in his head, needling him about smoking too much, and how it was naturally going to be affecting his wind.

Sanzo forced himself look down at the ground ahead of him instead of up at the ugly black birds, telling himself he needed to watch where he was going so he didn’t stumble and fall, but he really just desperately needed to tear his eyes away from them to fight off the encroaching panic.
He kept remembering all the stories he had heard as a child in the Temple about sky burials: how with the help of the rogyapas and their sharp charnel blades, the carrion birds would surround the high peak, devouring and carrying every last speck of the deceased off into the mountain winds, leaving nothing but a clean bare space in the small meadow where the body had been. He suppressed a shudder, picturing it now again in his mind’s eye. The priests could say all they wanted to about how it was just returning the “empty shell” back to the earth and sky from which it came, feeding the hungry creatures of this world with one’s lifeless flesh, one last dharmic gesture of charity, but he wasn’t quite done with his shell yet, at least not at the moment.

He actually began to curse his tobacco habit himself as his lungs started to burn like they were sucking in fire, instead of the dry desert air, and yet he found the pain strangely reassuring: at least as long as he felt it, he knew he was still alive. Still, his difficulty breathing, combined with the failing strength in his legs, told him he couldn’t go on like this much longer.

He heard the swooshing sound stop and chanced a quick glance upwards, to see if his tormentors had perchance abandoned their apparent intention of making a meal of him. But instead, they had somehow suddenly morphed into a larger seething group of not silent, hulking vultures, but instead thousands upon thousands of smaller noisy dark birds, perhaps ravens.

Sanzo remembered from some dim recess of trivia in his brain that the collective term for that particular bird was an “unkindness of ravens,” and as he looked up at the swirling black swarm, it certainly seemed appropriate. There were so very many, the group itself seemed to have become an entity all its own, all moving of one accord, and as soon as he made eye contact they began their hideous collective cawing. The raucous cacophony they were making was almost deafening, and only served to escalate Sanzo’s terror.

The shape of the unkindness was a concave hemisphere, a living, writhing, black bowl nearly blocking out the light of the desert sun, and it seemed to be descending towards his head at an alarming rate now. It was still following right along with him as he ran: he stopped, and they stopped, he ran, and they started right along with him again. It seemed at the same time both unbelievably surreal, and terrifyingly all-too-real to Sanzo as he frantically continued to try to escape them and their malevolent intentions towards him.

As he ran, he scanned the barren landscape around him for somewhere to seek shelter from them. There were small valleys and rises, and the occasional barren tree, but no place that looked remotely promising as far as offering any real shelter from his desperate plight. As he surveyed his surroundings, straining his eyes to the surrounding horizon for any possible place of respite, the toe of his sandal hooked on an errant rock, and he went tumbling down on his rubbery legs, the palms of his hands shredding on the sharp rocks in the rocky soil as he fell. He was breathless and panting anyway, and the harsh fall stunned him, knocking the wind out of him completely for a moment.

The ravens took the advantage of that instant to begin their descent, and as Sanzo began to scrabble frantically for his footing to rise up again, they were on him. He struggled uselessly against the tangled folds of his robes as they wrapped around his tired legs, restraining him, draining what little strength he had left. There was no way he could even stand as the seething, cawing, writhing mass of black avian fury spiraled down towards him, and he crawled desperately along the ground, trying frantically to escape it, the jagged rocks and cactus thorns tearing at his bloody hands as he scrabbled for handholds in the rocky sand to pull himself away.

He knew in some animal place in the back of his brain that it was futile, that he was finished, no matter how much he wanted to deny the fact. A soundless, helpless, terrified scream formed in the back of his throat…. A bitter taste rose up in his mouth, and his vision began to blur.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to end, goddammit…

There was supposed to be…

…more…

The last thing he remembered was a strange hammering sound, sounding like it was coming from far away, as his world became only darkness. He was certain he was hearing the last dying beats of his own heart.


****************************

“Sanzo!!”

Gojyo pounded on the door.

Sanzo stirred restlessly in his tangled, sweat-dampened sheets as the first light of day peeped in around the cracked celluloid blinds of the sleeping car cubicle.

“OI!! SANZO!!!”

Gojyo hammered with his fist on the door between their rooms again, adding a few vicious kicks for good measure. He had heard sounds coming from Sanzo’s room that he didn’t like one bit: muffled cries, and sounds like the monk was being strangled, and he was damned if he was going to let that go, if he was going to let the goddamn pissy-assed priest have his precious privacy while he was being snuffed.

“SANZO!! If you don’t open this goddamn door in five seconds, bouzu, I swear to the Merciful Goddess I am going to kick it down!”

Sanzo gradually opened his eyes, his heart still pounding mercilessly as the horrendous world of the nightmare began to recede and the world around him began to become real. He had a splitting headache, and Gojyo’s banging on the door was not helping matters. It did, however, bring him awake more quickly.

Impatient, Gojyo began to count down, “Five…Four…Three…”

“ALRIGHT!” Sanzo snarled, tumbling out of the berth and staggering to the door and unlocking it, “so, the rumors weren’t true, the kappa can count, after all,” he snarked.

Gojyo glared at him and stormed through the opened door.

“What the hell has got your panties in such a bunch, first thing in the morning? Fucking hell!” Sanzo exclaimed crankily, as he rubbed his eyes, falling back into the berth and looking around desperately for a smoke, hoping that his first cigarette might mitigate the pounding in his skull that had taken over for the kappa’s pounding on the door.

“What is my fucking problem?” Gojyo exploded, aggravated at being bitched at for his very legitimate concern. “It sounded like someone was fucking killing you in here, that’s what my fucking problem is.” The hanyou paced around the room, pausing to look at Sanzo stem to stern and assess his apparent good health, despite his having been nearly-murdered, from the sound of things. “What the fuck was going on in here?” he demanded.

“What?” Sanzo asked blurrily as he exhaled slowly, having finally found a smoke. He thought about Gojyo’s question for a second. “Oh…. that. Nightmare. Guess I was making some noise or something.” He considered a minute, scrubbing his hand over his face as some of the details of the dream came back to him. “It was kind of… creepy.” As he remembered more, Sanzo realized he wanted more and more to just forget it.

Gojyo sat down and lit a smoke for himself, trying to keep Sanzo from seeing how much his own hands were still trembling. He inhaled deeply and let it out quickly before he spoke.

“Creepy, my ass.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m not shitting you, man. You were making some fucking scary sounds, Sanzo. Gave me the willies.” He shivered involuntarily.

Sanzo raised an eyebrow, “really? Hmmm. Odd,” and seemed quite nonplussed about it.

Gojyo narrowed his eyes at the priest, slightly irritated by Sanzo’s apparent lack of appreciation for his concern for his well-being.

“Gods,” he muttered, “I hope you aren’t going to do that every night between here and Chang’an. “

Undaunted, he turned to Sanzo with a leer on his lips.

“I know… Uncle Gojyo will just have to do something to make sure you are sleeping better. Uncle Gojyo knows all kinds of ways to make pretty little boys sleepy…” he purred, putting on his best sleazy pedophile voice, and creeping his hands across the bed towards Sanzo’s thigh.

Sanzo slapped his wandering paw away dismissively. “Uncle Gojyo can just keep his lousy paws to himself. Pretty little boys have big guns. And get out of my damned bed.”

Gojyo sighed, feigning disappointment, “oh, you’re no fun at all.”

“Yeah, whatever. I need coffee for this head. Let’s get dressed and go eat. Either that or you can go bring me coffee.”

“You get dressed. I’ll watch,” Gojyo grinned, settling back into his seat with an expectant look at the blond. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen Sanzo dress before in hundreds of assorted inns and campsites, but there was something about their being alone, and so close together, in this rolling hotel that was really getting to Gojyo. He realized he was clearly finding Sanzo much harder to resist than usual, that something was changing, shifting between them. Unfortunately, he thought to himself, he wasn’t getting much of a mutual vibe along those lines from the goddamned ice princess of priests. But then Sanzo was almost impossible to read about pretty much everything, so it would figure he would be inscrutable about his sexual desires as well…

“Gojyo…”

“Alright, alright. Can’t blame a guy for trying.” He sighed and rose reluctantly. “It’s gonna be a long boring day anyway in this tin can on wheels.. Why don’t we go ahead and have a decent breakfast. Because, as you know, Hakkai always says…” and they chorused together in deadpan imitations of the healer’s most prim, didactic voice:

“…Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!!”


****************************


Later on, at breakfast, Gojyo found himself surreptitiously studying Sanzo over the rim of his coffee cup, and his practiced eyes noticed fine lines feathering out across the monk’s forehead under his fringe of pale hair, far more than were usually there, as well as faint dark circles under the down-turned violet eyes, which he saw were more deeply-hooded than usual. After falling asleep early the day before, and then going back to bed for even more sleep after that, it seemed to him that Sanzo should be looking more bright-eyed and rested than usual, not less. And despite the obvious fatigue, Sanzo was clearly more tense than usual, as well: the hanyou could easily see the slight bulge in the finely-chiseled profile that indicated his jaw was tightly clenched, and when he looked at Sanzo’s neck where it disappeared into his shirt collar, Gojyo saw the raised cords of veins pulsing in the pale column of his neck: he would bet that the monk’s blood pressure was through the roof at the moment.

Gojyo was definitely convinced that there was something was amiss with the closed-mouthed bouzu: something far beyond the usual burden basket-full of guilt, ghosts, unwanted responsibilities, and dead hopes that the holy man carried silently, day-in, day-out. Gojyo wondered, knowing Sanzo’s proclivity for non-self-disclosure, just how bad this new problem might be, to be causing him to retreat even further than usual behind his crusty exterior, and how hard it was going to be to ferret it out of him. The problem, of course, lay in getting the thick-skinned houshi to share anything… Looking at Sanzo, it was clear to Gojyo that his best hope for everything was in finding as many means as possible of getting him to relax during the remainder of their time alone together on the trip.

Sanzo glared daggers at Gojyo the minute he caught the redhead looking at him, choosing to interpret his traveling companion’s looks of concern as pure, unadulterated lust. As far as the reactions he seemed to be having, despite himself, in response to said lust, Sanzo chose to regard it all as merely an unwelcome aberration, probably just due to stress, fatigue, and confinement in small quarters for too long with the hormonal watersprite. He assured himself it was just those factors, combining to provoke an unfortunate natural response from his own unruly body, one that he would, of course, simply overrule and ignore… It was just one of the many reasons why he had not wanted the erogappa to accompany him, he thought to himself as he tried to avoid the other’s warm scarlet gaze. And it was absolutely meaningless, beyond being a simple inconvenience, that his jeans were becoming uncomfortably tight in the crotch area at the moment… He was relieved that they were sitting in a booth instead of the bench seat in the dining car, because he was certain the damned kappa would have immediately noticed his predicament, given half a chance, and no doubt would have wrongly interpreted it.

“What?!” he demanded snappishly, trying to ignore the growing heat he felt in his groin as the half-breed gazed at him. “What is your major malfunction, asshole?”

“So, what was that dream of yours about?” Gojyo asked casually, suppressing a grin. His acute hanyou olfactory sense had ratted Sanzo out: the scent of his arousal was unmistakable to Gojyo, and he could have recognized it in a roomful of skunks. It also told him something very valuable. So the perfect ivory priest was made of flesh after all... Gojyo’s brain whirled with new possibilities, and he had to take a deep breath – through his mouth - and corral his thoughts to stay on-task and ignore the immediate response his body was having to Sanzo’s scent.

“I dunno… birds and shit,” Sanzo replied vaguely, retreating behind his newspaper and rustling it irritably.

Gojyo sat up a little straighter in his seat, his fantasies about himself and Sanzo giving way for the time being to more pressing concerns. He took a sip of his coffee, and waited a second or two.

“What kind of birds?” he asked, as nonchalantly as he could manage.

Sanzo dropped his paper back down, sighing heavily. “I don’t know… why? Why do you ask?”

Gojyo rolled his eyes irritably, as if Sanzo was being slightly simple.

“Well, one doesn’t usually wake up screaming from nightmares about chickadees and titmice.”

Sanzo closed his eyes for a second or two and images of the horrendous nightmare teased at the corners of his mind, not enough to give him the whole story, but enough to bring back the feeling of panic, and some clear pictures of the terrible imagery of the dream. He sighed.

“Vultures. Lots of vultures. Over my head, and I was running. Then they changed - lots more of them, but something smaller and darker. Black- crows, I think – no, ravens. Yeah, it was ravens. The sound is different. We had ravens around the temple for a while when I was a kid. I remember now.”

Gojyo practically swallowed his tongue when Sanzo said vultures, but he schooled his face into a calm expression, and told himself over and over that it was just a coincidence. He forced himself to focus on what Sanzo was saying, and remember the details. If nothing else it, was unusual for the monk to open up about his dreams and his childhood, and any tidbits of information, even small ones, helped him to understand the mystery that was Genjyo Sanzo that much better.

“So these birds… they were chasing you?” he ventured carefully.

Sanzo plunked down the paper crossly.

“Look, Gojyo… I don’t remember, and I don’t fucking want to remember. If I woke up screaming and shit, why should I want to remember it? Let it go. Gimme a fuckin’ break!”

Sanzo pulled the paper back up firmly, obviously forbidding any further conversation, at least on that subject. Gojyo chewed his lip worriedly. Sanzo may be trying to ignore or bury his own concerns, but something was definitely bothering the kappa now. It was all on a vague intuitive level, but too many things were slightly out of place, not fitting into the right groove… There was something or someone behind it all, he just knew it, and it wasn’t good.

Goyjo couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he definitely had what Banri used to call a “fuckin’ bad feeling,” and it wasn’t all just the after-effects of the Mongolian vodka.

TBC