Absolution

Author’s note: this is for my Gojyo, Hakkai, and Goku, from their grumpy-pants Sanzo. Sankyuu for putting up with me.

ABSOLUTION


“Fuck, Hakkai, you scared the shit out of me. Knock next time, why don’t you?” Sanzo looked up in surprise and irritation from his desk in his study as Hakkai stood ghostlike in the doorway in front of him, looking strangely uncomfortable in the dim lamplight. Sanzo made curt motions inviting him into the small paneled room, and turned in his chair to face him. Hakkai quietly closed the door behind him, and bowing slightly as he stepped forward into the room.

“Sumimasen, Sanzo-sama, I saw the door to your quarters was open, and since I saw Goku asleep on his futon, I didn’t want to awaken him.”

“Tch. Yeh, thanks for that. Took me forever to get the little bastard to sleep tonight. A certain kappa thought it would be fun to give him a shitload of durian candy while we were in the village this afternoon. So all evening I not only had to deal with his sugar buzz from hell, but breath that would put down a water buffalo.”

“Ahaha… I did notice a rather peculiar… aroma… when I came into the room, but I thought perhaps Goku had just been neglecting to change his socks frequently enough again. I will speak to Gojyo about the candy issue. It doesn’t make it any easier for the saru to focus on his lessons, either.”

“Yeah, well, at least get him to buy him something that doesn’t smell like roadkill.” Sanzo frowned at the stack of paperwork he had been laboring over at his desk, and took an appraising look at his guest for a moment, narrowing his eyes critically. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as he spoke wearily.

“So, what is it, there must be something important to bring you out this late, and without your usual red-headed appendage. What’s the deal?” He scooted back from his desk and swung around towards the battered couch that barely fit against the adjacent wall, propping his bare feet up on the closest arm. He motioned to the couch for Hakkai to sit, lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly and gratefully, and cocked his head and raised an eyebrow as he trained an intense violet gaze on the other man in the room.

“Maa, Sanzo, you don’t mince words, do you? “ Hakkai looked down on his hands where they lay folded neatly in his lap, avoiding the priest’s stare at first. He looked up and faced him, a nervous flush in his cheeks, “but then I suppose that is why I am here, ultimately.” He looked back down at his hands again, and took several long seconds collecting his words, organizing them. Sanzo simply smoked, and waited.

“I guess it comes down to this, Sanzo: I simply don’t know how to go on from here. I don’t even know if I have a right to. I know the Sanbutsushin gave me this new name and this new life, but I still have this same scar on my belly to remind me, and these same hands that were bloodied with all the killings, and this same head that contains all the horrible memories… And they keep playing back over and over. All those people that I killed – and now that I am youkai myself, how can I not think of them as people? – I keep thinking of their faces, and I have to wonder? What gives me the right to go on breathing when their breath is stilled? How dare I?”

As he went on, his voice was steadily rising in pitch, and his body was beginning to tremble. Sanzo only watched, still quiet, lighting a second cigarette from the first, and stubbing the first one out in a crude clay ashtray on his desk that Hakkai had helped Goku make for him. He waited while Hakkai wrestled with an obviously strong wave of emotion that threatened to overwhelm him, and nodded slightly when he continued again.

“I don’t know, Sanzo… I just feel so… so lost. I’ve lost Kanan forever, and now I look back and I can’t help but wonder if … we … well, if we were being punished, you know? Because what we were doing was wrong…and it was our sin... and,…God,.. our sin just went on to infect so many people… to ruin so many lives… And I feel so fucking responsible… it even makes what I had with her seem tainted, and… even those good memories, now …” His voice trembled and tears glittered in his green eyes. He locked eyes with Sanzo as the tears spilled out and his chest began to be shaken by the sobs he was holding in. “They were all I have, those memories, Sanzo… and now,… now I don’t…” His head went down into his hands and he surrendered to the grief he had been holding back, for his Kanan, for the man Cho Gonou had wanted to be with her, and for all the souls he had sent from this world, youkai souls, souls like his own. His slender frame shook as he sobbed silently.

Perhaps it was the fact that his sobs were silent that pierced the steel enclosure around Genjyo Sanzo’s heart. He had listened to Hakkai’s disclosure, somehow managing to remain detached, objective. As the other man spooled out his tale he had clinically noted to himself the things that he would say in response, the small, hopefully helpful, but still politely distant suggestions he might be able to make without yielding up too much of himself. But the further Hakkai descended into his pain, the more uncomfortable Sanzo became, the more the other man’s grief started to work its way under the monk’s skin like a grain of sand under the scale of a snake. At first it was an almost imperceptible irritant, but it grew more and more painful as time went on, as the emotion escalated, becoming a palpable throbbing ache just under Sanzo’s ribs as Hakkai dissolved into mute weeping.

Images of a youth mourning his master alone by a river came unbidden into Sanzo’s mind, the hot tears washing over the boy’s young face as the cool river coursed over the rocks at his bare feet. He remembered all too well how he had felt that day at the end of that first solitary session of grieving for Koumyuu, as he turned the Smith & Wesson over and over in his hand, the weight of it strange and cold, the violence inherent in the weapon still a terrifying stranger to him. He had pressed it to his temple, felt the circle of steel of the end of the muzzle hard and cruel against his skin as his hand trembled.

He had been cocking the hammer experimentally as his eyes stared off into space, gazing blankly across the river in the deepening twilight, when suddenly through the thick tears in his eyes he saw hundreds – no, thousands - of tiny flashes of gold and silver popping randomly out of the river directly in front of him, over and over. Blinking to clear his vision, he saw that some species of fish had come to the surface to feed on some infinitesimal insect in the air over the surface of the water, and in their leaping to catch their dinner, their silver bellies were flashing brilliantly as they caught the last rays of the day’s sun. The spectacle was small but mesmerizing, and he didn’t even realize he had put the gun down beside him on the riverbank until several minutes later, sometime after the fish had ceased their amazing airshow. The young new-made priest looked at the gun and sighed tiredly. Its use for self-destruction seemed almost irreverent at that moment, after the flagrant display of life just shown him by the river, the same river that had borne him to Koumyuu all those years ago. He could almost hear his Master’s musical voice in the rippling of the water at that moment, chiding him, telling him to carry on, to persevere.

Sanzo leaned forward in his chair, feeling himself pulled towards the grieving man, wanting somehow to comfort him, yet afraid if he touched him, if he allowed the smallest breach of that unseen wall, his own grief, or any of a countless number of other unexpressed accumulated needs and longings, would come flooding through the hole in that wall somehow, and things would begin to happen that he had he managed to keep at bay for so many years.

And yet he felt his hand magnetically pulled to the other man as he leaned towards him, wanting so badly to soothe him, to tell him it was alright, to tell the young boy he had been that it would be alright… He reached out, moving towards Hakkai where he was crumpled forward on the couch, and rested his hand firmly on his shoulder.
“Hakkai…” The glassy emerald eyes looked up at his, locking in with his gaze, seeking absolution, seeking relief and recognition. And Sanzo did recognize them. His violet eyes saw his own pain reflected back to him in the other man’s deep green watery orbs.

“Hakkai, it wasn’t sin… you weren’t being punished. That Catholic school messed with your head.”

Hakkai hung his head, shaking it in disbelief, and instinctively Sanzo pulled him towards him, turning him, forcing the grieving man to look at him. Hakkai was boneless, there was no resistance in his body, and at Sanzo’s touch he moved towards him in a loose wave, sliding before the priest on his knees, like the supplicant at Mass he had been in his childhood, looking up at Sanzo, his face a roadmap of pain and need.

Sanzo shook him gently with the hands he still had planted on his shoulders. “And regardless, Hakkai, it’s over with… this is your life, here, now. It is what it is.“

He looked at the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray and stubbed it out, picking up the clay dish and shaking it gently at the trembling youkai. “This is your life – the things you teach that goddamn brainless kid out there – Tenkai knows I could never get any of that stuff in his head. And your healing is your life. And god help you, that cottage with that sorry ass erogappa is your life – the one thing I will say for him is he does care about his friends, and you more than anybody. When he thought you were dead, I wasn’t too sure he wasn’t going to just head along after you. All of those things are your life now. Fuck the past. This is it.”

Hakkai was still sobbing, almost incoherently, “but I don’t deserve it. Why should I be happy? They are all dead… Why me? I just can’t live with it… I can’t bear it…how can I possibly go on?...”

The priest remembered every rainy day he had spent chastising himself for his failure to save Koumyuu, asking himself the same questions. Why should he be alive and Koumyuu dead? Why should he be the Sanzo Priest, Koumyuu was the one with all the wisdom and knowledge… Why couldn’t he have saved him? He should have been able to save him…

Suddenly he had to silence Hakkai’s fears and pain, in order to quiet his own, he had to stop it, or it would drown them both. He pulled Hakkai to him and pressed his mouth to his, stopping the horrible words, the terrible drowning words, in the only way he could think of, slanting his head to pull Hakkai’s mouth closer, sucking the pain out as he pulled the breath from the other man’s mouth in a long, deep, soul-bruising kiss.

As they parted from that first kiss, some indefinable energy in the air of the room shifted, something inside them both shifted, and a pact was made between them in that moment. Hakkai took his monacle off and stood to lock the study door, then kneeled back down in front of Sanzo, waiting. The priest took his face in his hands again, and they kissed again, urgently this time but not bruisingly, exploring each other’s mouths with a need borne of years of pain and nameless longing. Long muscled arms wound around strong backs, and slender fingers pulled and clutched at clothing that had suddenly become an irritating intrusion. Sanzo’s leather top and gloves were the first items to hit the floor, along with the t-shirt Hakkai had thrown on carelessly when he had left the cabin earlier that evening.

Hakkai stroked Sanzo’s chest as he leaned towards him in the chair, shivering as the priest raked his fingernails through his thick chestnut hair. He trailed worshipful kisses up and down the skin of Sanzo’s neck and chest, stopping at the flat pink nipples to nip and suckle them as they hardened in response to his attentions. The monk shuddered and shifted his hips forward in the chair, and as he did Hakkai hastily relieved him of his jeans, the better to run his hands across the supple flesh of his belly and hips, and around to sample the smooth curves of his ass as he moved his attentions downward. The youkai sat up on his knees slightly, looking with heavy-lidded eyes for several long seconds at Sanzo’s body in the golden lamp glow of his study, gazing at the priest’s cock, now fully erect before him.

Hakkai remembered the marble statues of the saints at the orphanage where he grew up – he had the same feeling of veneration as he looked at Sanzo’s skin, marble-pale in this light, and Sanzo’s reed-thin body- that he used to get when he was a small child looking up at the strange, tall saints. Their gaunt angular faces were so unlike his own, but there was usually a look of far-off suffering in their strange round eyes that nonetheless summoned him to them, made him want to light the candles at their feet, and utter his secret prayers.

This man before him was no saint, he knew that, but his cool blue-veined skin called to him just as the saints’ eyes had, and his hard cock wept pearly tears just like those saint’s eyes had wept real tears for him in his childhood fantasies. He tasted the drops with the tip of his tongue, and they were bitter and salty just as he had imagined the poor saints’ tears to be. His heart contracted with the boldness of his move, to not only touch his own saint so intimately, this saviour of his, but to hear the very real gasp of pleasure that issued from the houshi at this small touch. Emboldened, he dragged his tongue lightly around the head of the cock he held gingerly in his hand, and was rewarded by a soft moan from the priest for each slow soft circle his tongue made. Sanzo’s head lolled back against the chair and his hands slid up and kneaded the flesh of Hakkai’s bare shoulders.

Being so close to him now, Hakkai was becoming almost drunk with the smell of his priest’s arousal, a scent he had never known existed before this moment. He blessed his youkai senses for being so much more acute, and drank it the fragrance in like sweet communion wine. He found it was most intense at his balls, now snugged up in their silky sac, and he kissed and lapped at them gently, only to be rewarded immediately by more shudders of pleasure from Sanzo. He also scented it in the monk’s soft tawny hair, and he ruched his nails through the soft curls and bit at them gently, his teeth grazing the flesh beneath as he reveled in the elemental scent. As he did so, the houshi made low soft groans and dug his nails even harder into the flesh of Hakkai’s shoulders.

“Gods, Hakkai… please… do it or stop… I can’t take much more of this…” Sanzo hissed between gritted teeth.

Wide and reverent emerald eyes looked into intense violet, barely visible under heavy dark lids.

“Yes, I understand,” Hakkai said, his voice now quiet and calm, almost serene. Leaning down, he lightly stroked the full length of Sanzo’s legs, feeling under his sensitive healer’s fingers the taut skin covering hard ropy muscles, the core heat from his body palpable at the inside of his thighs, the pale golden hairs blanketing some areas like very fine down, and the strong pulses from the large veins on top of his feet and behind his knees. He felt Sanzo’s breath shallow and rapid on his head as he looked down on him, smelled the tobacco, and the faint trace of whiskey from the shot or two Sanzo must have had earlier that night from the bottle he knew the priest kept in the drawer of his desk. This was no saint, this was a living breathing needing wanting man, and he needed and wanted him. The tangible evidence was there in front of him, pulsing and beautiful and alive.

Hakkai took Sanzo’s member slowly into his mouth, tentatively at first, feeling the head slide past his lips, and feeling the responding small shudder from the priest as he ran his tongue around the head inside his mouth. Bit by bit he began working his mouth down the cock, taking it deeper into his mouth with each stroke, letting his intuition and Sanzo’s reactions guide him in this thing he had never done before. He found himself strangely unafraid, and too focused on what he was doing to be concerned about any implications of it. “It is what it is,” he heard echoing in his head. Yes. Yes. Yes...

He circled the base of Sanzo’s cock with one hand, cupping long fingers around the priest’s balls. He began to experiment with his tongue, running it around the head as he got to the end of a stroke, before driving his mouth back down, and dragging it against what seemed to be a most sensitive spot on the underside just behind the head on the way back down. As he found those acute pleasures for Sanzo, rewarded each time by increasingly-throaty groans and growls from the priest, he began to really relax into what he was doing, and was able to take his full length much deeper into his throat. Soon he just naturally fell into a sensual slow rhythm, taking him deeply on each stroke, caressing his cock with his tongue.

Sanzo began pushing and pulling against him now; his moans began to issue from deep in his chest, and the sounds of his pleasure resonated within Hakkai’s core, making him want, need, badly to hear more. It was a sound of relief and release, of a level of pure unfettered pleasure he knew had been too scarce in both of their lives. The knowledge that he could give that to the priest was an immediately empowering thing to Hakkai, something beyond erotic, and it drove him on. His eyes slid closed in a conjoined ecstasy now, lost in the pleasure he was both giving and receiving, his heart thudding wildly as his head bobbed in a slow, sensuous rhythm over Sanzo’s lap.

“H’kai, you’d better stop…” Sanzo growled warningly. Hakkai answered his warning by taking his cock deeper still into his throat, and stepping up his pace, almost daring him. He wanted to give Sanzo the full measure, all that he could give, and while in some small dim corner of his mind he thought he should be afraid, or disgusted, he was not in the least.

Sanzo’s hands slid up into his hair, his long elegant fingers tangled in Hakkai’s dark brown thatch, as the priest suddenly arched his back and stiffened, his head back, his eyes closed, and his mouth a silent “O.” Hakkai felt the subtle changes of the cock in his mouth as Sanzo’s climax overtook him, and took him as deeply as he possibly could when he came, tightening his lips and tongue around him as he pulsed again and again in his mouth, and feeling the hot spend hit the back of his throat.

Release… Absolution… Redemption.

He hadn’t even realized he had done it, but sometime after Sanzo had come, Hakkai had wrapped both arms around the priest below his waist, and had molded his body against him, still kneeling before him. Sanzo was still holding his head with the slender fingers of one hand still knit up in his hair, and he had let the hand other fall to rest on his shoulder. Hakkai shifted in Sanzo’s lap, silently incredulous now as the priest, the ever-reserved and stoic great Genjyo Sanzo the 31st, actually began stroking his hair, gently and idly, almost as if it were just a natural casual thing he did every day, without even thinking. They stayed like that for quite some time, neither feeling the need to change positions or speak, until – inevitably - Sanzo’s addiction to nicotine got the better of him.

“Tch…your knees must be killing you,” he observed.

“Ah, well, yes, actually, I think both legs went to sleep from the knees down about ten minutes ago,” Hakkai said looking up at Sanzo with the first genuine smile the priest had seen on the man in quite a while.

“Why didn’t you say something, moron?”

“Because I was quite content with the way things were… I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I wanted it to last as long as possible.”

He gave another small smile, a little sadder this time, and rose carefully and stiffly from his place at Sanzo’s feet. He knew as he did that what had just happened would never happen again: Sanzo was who he was, after all, a very important man. And there was Goku to contend with… It clearly just wasn’t meant to be. And thinking honestly, Hakkai couldn’t say at this point for certain that he absolutely knew he would want it to continue, even if it could. But he did know that the moment had been both very important and exceptionally sweet for both of them, and he was sorry to see it end.

“Arigato,” he said as he took his monacle from Sanzo when he handed it to him. He slipped on his t-shirt and sat down on the couch, watching as Sanzo slipped his jeans and top back on, lit up a smoke, and took a long pull on it. Wordlessly the priest opened his drawer and pulled out his bottle of whiskey and two shotglasses, as well as a bag of kimchi flavored rice crisps of a particular brand that the priest favored. He plunked the bag of crisps down on the couch between them, poured them each a shot, handing Hakkai his.

Toasting his glass to Sanzo’s with a quiet “kampai,” Hakkai sipped his thoughtfully, grateful for the sweet burn of the amber liquid as it went down. The funky hot-salty flavor of the crisps was actually a strangely appropriate counterpoint to the fiery sweet heat of the whisky.

“What kind of a host would I be if I let you go away without offering food or drink?” Sanzo mused sardonically, one side of his mouth twisted up in a wry grin. He finished his shot, waited until Hakkai finished his, and poured them each one more, draining his quickly.

“Hakkai…” he began slowly, steepling his fingers as he paused to formulate his thoughts.

“It’s o.k., Sanzo, you don’t have to worry. I know this…” he gestured around the small study, indicating what had just happened, “can’t happen again.”

“No… no, it’s not that. It’s all the stuff you said… before.”

Hakkai thought for a minute. He played the events of the evening back in his head like a movie in fast-forward, stopping to linger on some of the things Sanzo had said to him, and some of the moments when they had been… intimate.

“No, I think that’s o.k. too, Sanzo. I think you already gave me my answer. In more ways than one. It is what it is. We are a lot alike, you and I, and I think when we find absolution, in any form, we have to take it for what it is and be content.” He sipped on his whiskey, a small enigmatic smile playing across his face. “I do feel strangely content now, Sanzo. And that’s a helluva lot better than I felt when I got here. So, arigato, Sanzo-sama.” Standing, he bowed his head slightly to Sanzo, “and now, if you will forgive me, I’m sure Hakuryuu is thinking I abandoned him outside. He was not happy when I told him to stay parked out there as it was.”

Slightly puzzled by the turn of events, but enough of a poker player to know when to when to stay his hand, Sanzo stood and opened the door for Hakkai. “I won’t keep you then. I’ll walk you out.”

Shaking his head as he walked past Goku, who was snoring loud enough to rattle the windows, and still reeking of the durian candy, he followed Hakkai into the parking lot outside the living quarters of the monastery.

Hakkai stretched his back and looked up at the evening sky, “beautiful night, though.”

“Tch, I guess,” Sanzo mumbled. He was already feeling distracted by his responsibilities again, and remembered something he had meant to tell Hakkai before. “You and the redhead gonna be around tomorrow? I got a message I am being called before the Talking Heads, and somehow it involves me and the monkey and you and even the freaking kappa. I was told to have all of you available in the next few days… all will be revealed. I have no idea what the fuck what is going on.” The irritation was rising in his voice, and Hakkai would have bet if he could have taken the monk’s blood pressure it would have been highly elevated.

“Maa, maa, Sanzo, time to give you some of your own medicine,” Hakkai laughed as he climbed into Hakuryuu and started up the motor. “ ‘It is what it is’, right?” he smiled, struggling not to laugh out loud as Sanzo gritted his teeth and shook his head, the irritation clear in his face. Hakkai touched his arm gently, surprised that Sanzo did not recoil as he usually might have, “whatever it is, we will get through it somehow. Besides, if it involves all four of us, how bad could it be? Don’t worry so much – what we think, we become, right?” **

“Tch. And just when did you get to be such a fucking philosopher?” Sanzo said drily. “I knew I should never have given you that goddamn layman’s sash!!” he yelled after Hakkai as he drove away.

Hakkai simply smiled and waved over his shoulder as he drove off into the night.

~owari~

** “What we think, we become” is a quote from the Buddha. As a Layman Buddhist, which the sash apparently signifies, Hakkai would have made a commitment to expand and explore his beliefs and improve himself through the study the of Buddhist texts and sutras, and to spend a certain amount of his time in introspection and meditation, amongst a community of monks whenever possible.

Author’s notes:

Yes, I normally write SanzoXGojyo, and this is a SanzoXHakkai story, a pairing one doesn’t see too often. And yes, for anyone who has really been paying attention,( and there may be no one with that good a memory, in which case I am ratting myself out unnecessarily, but oh well)… yes, I did once, not long after I started writing fanfiction in late ‘07, have a LiveJournal journal entry where I went on and on about how icky and unattractive I thought the pairing of Hakkai and Sanzo was. But as my knowledge of Saiyuki has deepened, I have been able to get past the OTP concept and see the interesting possibilities in all kinds of pairings, and even write about several of them. My feeling now is that if we get so dedicated to one pairing that that we refuse to consider any others, we limit what we can learn from and enjoy from the fandom. One of the things that makes Saiyuki so endlessly fascinating, and so perfectly suited for yaoi, is that it does have so many interesting male characters with so many complex interrelationships, and that really does make for lots and lots of believable yaoi situations – and my eternal gratitude goes to Minekura-sensei for giving them all to us.

On a lighter note, this story contains a passing mention of the durian fruit, and its ..er.. distinctive fragrance. My steady readers will know that this is my second reference to the notorious durian fruit. I am pleased to report that in the time since I posted my “A Matter of Taste”, which centered around the malodorous stuff, I have actually tasted the genuine article in the form of a durian smoothie from a Vietnamese restaurant in my area. My daughter recently brought it to me as a surprise ( ! ), and refused to tell me what it was before I tasted it, so I can honestly say I think my initial reaction was objective. The smoothie itself was made of just durian, sugar, and ice, so the only added taste was the sweetness of the sugar. I must admit, it was one of the strangest things I had ever tasted, and my first response was, predictably, “What the fuck is that?” I thought they had taken some obscure entree from the restaurant’s menu and run it through the blender with ice and sugar.

Once my daughter let the smelly cat out of the bag, it made sense; it is a combination of flavors somewhat like strong cheese, garlic and onions (more like shallots, really), and almonds – that’s as close as I can get. I think the smell was partially subdued by the fact that it was freezing cold, but my daughter’s partner, who wasn’t having any of it, still ran away from both of us if we got anywhere near her for the rest of the afternoon. And there were some rather unfortunate after-effects - let’s just say you get to taste the durian more than once when you consume it. All in all, I think I do like the flavor, but I would decidedly not use it in sweet things. My first thought as a chef was that, especially given the creamy texture of the durian fruit’s flesh, it would make a killer dip if blended with a little sour cream or yogurt – it’s definitely better-suited for the savory uses than the sweet, in my book. At any rate, let it be noted that this writer had the courage of her convictions, and tried what she wrote about when given the chance, even in the face of potential gastronomic and olfactory disaster.

hg