Author's Notes: I remember writing this is all of a single day in the hotel room while we were moving my grandmother into the old folk's home last October. And then I abandoned it; I think it was around that time that life began to go to hell, and I lost all interest in writing, or I felt I couldn't write anything decent. I found a lot of unfinished works from this time, works I don't really recall writing (but then, I usually don't recall writing things a while after they're finished), and decided to finish them.

This particular little ficlet takes place while they boys are on the road, in one of their innumerable townships, renting rooms in one of many identical hotels. A regular night, if not for the insinuations of an enemy that had slithered into Hakkai's mind. The fic was more an exercise in description, so my plot's a little weak. Please forgive me.

Please enjoy.

Disclaimer: I do not own Saiyuki or the character of Saiyuki. Please do not sue me; I'm in college and have no money.

Warning: Shonen-ai, violence, cursing, thunderstorms, angst, angst, angst and other bullshit.

The Fight

Another hotel room, another night lying in a strange bed. I couldn't sleep. Something was wrong with the mattress; it was lumpy or the straw filling was sticking into my side. I was too tired to try and figure out which. The people passing in the hallways were talking. The couple in the room next to us was having appallingly loud sex. Gojyo got himself drunk again and was snoring. We'd had a fight, so he was sleeping in the other bed, probably another reason I find my own uncomfortable.

I was sitting up in bed, my feet propped on the sill as I stared out the window into the night, listening. It was too dark to see it, but it was raining. The room around me was the color of pitch, except when lightning flared; then the briefest moment of stark white. The world outside was painted sepia from the streetlamp, the flame so thin and weak that it barely lit anything but the inside of the tiny globe of glass around it.

A siren blared in the distance; lightning must have struck. I could feel something in me tense. My shoulders were aching, my legs were aching; everything in my body was a mass of pain.

And the sound of rain made it so much worse. I could feel a headache mounting behind my eyes; I reached up to take off my monocle and rubbed them, as if that might make any difference.

From morning to night we've been driving, day after day after day until it feels like every day was the same. Even the fights feel the same, with youkai, among our own group. Except this one, the first one that we had ever been so cruel to one another since Banri's visit, the first time I had ever ordered Gojyo from my bed.

And now it was raining, and all I could think of was what I'd said, what he'd said. I shivered, and never before had I wanted to go home quite this badly. Back to Gojyo's little shack on the outskirts of town, back to the tiny double bed we crammed ourselves into every night, back to the kitchen with it's eternally-filthy tiles. Back to my book collection, back to his garden, back to the marketplace where I'd almost started making friends, back to the box by the stove where he put his poker winnings.

The rain didn't make me think of her, of my Kanan. It hadn't been raining when she was taken or when she'd died, that was later, a day or two, when I had almost bled out. The rain made me think of him, before we'd known one another, before we'd come to depend on one another, before I'd even considered trusting him enough to love again. It made the fact that I'd been so horrible sting deeper than ever before. I could feel the heaviness of tears welling in my eyes, and I tilted my head back, as if that might stop them from falling.

I couldn't remember what had started the fight; it had been building for days now. I think it was one of the youkai we'd fought, something he'd said which had seemed so inconsequential, trite even, as Gojyo's weapon tore him apart, had been eating at me. I thought hard on it; what had he said?

'A monster and a half-breed, you two are so the perfect couple. You'll tear one another apart someday.' That was it, so simple, but curses often were. I felt my lips moving with the words, and then shook my head, turning back to the window in time to see a fork of lightning streak across the sky.

Behind me, Gojyo was still snoring. I felt cold.

I'd snapped at something he'd said at supper earlier tonight, hadn't even realized it was impolite before Sanzo sent me a questioning look. I think I'd spoken harshly against his going out and drinking tonight; I'd wanted him to stay in with me. He went anyway, and I sat in the room, boiling with rage.

He returned close to midnight, sloppily drunk, and leaned over to kiss me, but I shoved him away. Arms grasped in a desperate attempt to regain his balance, mouth gaping, disoriented and insulted. I think he debated on whether or not he would be able to stand up straight and hit me.

'The hell is your problem, Kai?' he'd hissed, knees folding under his weight. Dark eyes glinted ruby as they scowled up at me from the floor. 'Been pissy since this morning. You on the rag or something?'

Coarse commentary, meant to be demeaning. It wasn't helping me calm down. I stood over him, reaching down to grab a handful of his hair, radiating disapproval from every pore. At this point it didn't matter anymore that Gojyo was a friend of mine, a man whose affection I depended to make my own life a little brighter. At that moment he was just another person, someone I wanted to tear apart any way I could, someone I could hurt like it hurt me to breathe, to exist.

'You think I want to be kissed by a man who still smells like his whores? You think I want to be fucked by some wonton, worthless half-breed piece of shit?' I knew that was the wrong thing to say the moment I said it, I knew by the look on his face, the way the words seemed to sink in and how he seemed younger. He was so much younger, really, barely a man at all. It had been so easy to think of him as more than another a nineteen-year-old boy, one of many.

He fought to his feet then, tried to reach up and unclench my fisted hands, but his fingers were clumsy, and I was still furious. I pushed him again, against the wall, and something went flying from the table beside us, an ashtray full of butts. He was glaring down at me, but he didn't fight, not much. We both knew it was pointless; I would always be stronger, faster, more cunning, even when he wasn't inebriated.

'All of a sudden you give a damn about me sleeping around, being half-breed? Or did you care this whole time and just couldn't hold it in anymore, eh? You're one to talk, you know; sister-fucking freak of nature. How are you any better than me? At least I didn't murder a thousand innocent people.'

'They were youkai,' I snarled, pressing him harder against the wall, hands at his throat.

'So am I. So are you. You gonna kill me too, put another leaf on that mark you got? You gonna kill yourself? You gonna kill Goku, or the few nice youkai we found in the past months? And what then, when you run out of youkai, you gonna turn on humans? You're a fucking psycho, Hakkai; they should've put you down when they had the chance.'

I threw him to the floor and brought my heel down on his chest, driving the air out of his lungs. He tried to curl, to kick back, but he was gasping and not quite able to see. The hits that did make contact slid right off, no energy behind them. He wasn't fighting back in earnest; I hadn't really expected him to.

'Was this love,' I wondered, peering at the outside lamp, watching the rain and wind slip inside its glass housing and snuffing the flame. Was it love when one man beat another, with the intent to kill, for the sole reason of keeping him close at hand? Was it love when the victim wouldn't fight back in case he might hurt his victimizing lover? Was it love when couples fought like they did, killed one another like those great tragic plays? Was it love when they didn't speak for years and spent their evenings glaring at one another across the dinner table?

It hadn't been like this with Kanan. She had been so gentle, to desperately kind that I wanted only to be like her, to be with her. She had never left to sleep with other men. She had never wanted anything more than the small family we provided for one another, the quiet life we had, not rich but not unhappy. Things had been so different then; I had been so different then. We had been so innocent, so unknowing, and what hadn't killed me had made her kill herself, had made me into something inhuman.

Life was upside down now. I had tried hard to make a frame of what I'd known of my life with Kanan with Gojyo, but he was unlike her. Deep down he was as caring a man as one could ever find, but it was hard to get past the defenses and nonchalance and despair he had built up like a shell around his soul. It had been almost a year before he'd trusted me not to up and leave him, still longer before he'd ever shown that he was serious the way I was about things. I blamed the gods for screwing up the calmness of our lives with their mission to save the world.

Fuck the world; I didn't care if it burned, not anymore. I watched the rain as it poured against the window, the wind screaming over the plains.

'Fuck you,' I'd screamed. I didn't know what else I could say, too angry to be eloquent. 'Fuck you, you whore, you wretch. Too blind to notice anything but your own fucking dick, boo-hooing because your mother didn't love you.' At least he'd had a mother; at least he'd had his brother to cling to after she was gone. Kanan and I had been separated; I'd always been alone as a child. How could he know what a sting that loneliness gave, until it was right to live so immorally as with one's own sister?

Only now I recognized that he understood it better than I'd thought at the time. Why else would he go boozing every night, sleeping around, even when I'd told him I didn't like it? He'd has his vices, I'd had Kanan; we weren't so different.

The room felt cold, and I automatically wiped a sleeve across my eyes, smearing tear tracks on my face. I hadn't realized I'd been crying until then. I hadn't realized that my heart was beating so fast it hurt, that my stomach was twisted with nausea. The guilt had always made me feel sick, and tonight the bile in my mouth tasted especially bitter.

He'd let me kick him around until I'd stopped feeling so angry. He was probably numbed from his drinks to feel much. I wasn't sure how he was able to pick himself up off the floor when I'd retreated to the bathroom and locked myself in. He'd been feinting sleep in the bed I'd obviously claimed, but I shook his shoulder and told him to leave. I didn't want him with me tonight.

I did want him, though, when the rain started, when I'd begun to turn things over in my head, to examine my own reactions. But he'd been asleep by the time I felt the urge to apologize, and now I was alone.

After a moment I recognized that the air in the room had fallen silent. There was no more snoring, and the mattress under me shifted, dipped to accommodate new weight. I flinched when his arms looped around and pulled me back into his chest, but I let it happen. He was warm and strong around me, and one of his hands reached up to wipe against my cheek. I felt a fresh wave of tears start up, just because he was being so quiet, so accepting, as if all of this was not my fault.

I leaned my head back against his shoulder and cried for the first time since our mission to India began. I moaned softly, murmuring apologies, insisting how much I wanted to go home, that I wanted this to just be over. He let it happen, just as he had let me beat him almost unconscious, and didn't breathe a word. Nothing in the way he held me suggested he wanted anything more than just to be here, to exist like this. It was agonizing; I wished he'd hit me instead.

After a time, when I'd tired myself out and was aching quietly, he leaned back against the headboard and lumpy pillows, letting me rest my cheek against his shoulder. It was bony, he had always been shockingly thin, but it felt better than when I'd laid down before, alone. I was half-asleep in moments, lulled by the silence and the warmth, exhaustion finally taking hold, hours too late. I sensed that it was nearly dawn, and Sanzo would soon demand we pile back into the jeep not long after. I couldn't help dozing off, and the only thing that woke me was Gojyo's fingers in my hair, combing it back as he spoke.

"It's been rough on all of us, Kai," he was murmuring, his voice as clear as it was soft. The sound of the rain against the window nearly made him unintelligible, he was whispering so lowly. "We'll go home soon, I promise. We'll kill those bastards and go straight home."

"I'm sorry," I sighed again. It seemed all I could say now. My fingers clenched in his thin shirt and I felt my chest give a quiet heave under me. Fingers reached down to stroke my cheek, smelled like tobacco; his smoking hand, his right. A thumb brushed against my ear. He didn't smell like drink anymore, and I realized suddenly that he should've been sweating it out by now, should've reeked.

He hadn't been drunk at all. A distressed sound slipped out before I could stop it, regret surged once more through my veins. He'd taken a beating so quietly, hadn't complained about it, just fell into bed and pretended to sleep, all night, for hours, thinking that I hated him. I truly felt like a monster.

"Oh, god, Gojyo, I'm so sorry."

"Quiet. Get some sleep."

"I shouldn't have said all that, it was wrong of me and-"

"I said pretty awful things too. It's all right." It felt wrong to let him forgive me so easily. He at least had the right to beat me to the brink of death, I was sure.

My fingers scrambled up to touch his face, pads grazing against the smoothness of his jaw. I could feel the heat of bruises; it made my stomach lurch. I couldn't seem to stop shaking, even as he let me sit up and peer through the darkness at the damage I had caused.

Lightning flashed, and I saw in that flicker the dark purple all down his neck, a black eye blooming, coupled by more darkness on his cheek. His arms and shoulders were bad off, and I guessed that under his shirt, his chest was a mass of angry black. I wondered if I'd cracked a rib or two, listened to see if his breathing was hoarse.

In that moment when I saw his wounds, he saw the horror on my face. And before I could say anything he had pitched himself forward, both hands cupping my cheeks drawing me near. He pressed his lips to mine, giving love when I deserved violence, hatred.

"He was right, you were right," I said wretchedly, pulling away. "I'm a monster. Oh god, what have I done?" He shouldn't have been doing this; he should've been on the other side of the room, terrified, begging me to stay away, fighting me off as he would other youkai. He should've cut my head off my body hours ago.

"Hush, Hakkai. Be quiet. I've had worse beatings in my life. It's okay. Not to say I'm very pleased you fucked up my face for the next couple weeks, but I'm all right. It's you I'm worried about." What if I'd done this to Goku, or worse, to Sanzo? I could've killed Sanzo; he was human, weakest of us all.

"It's not all right, you're not all right. How could I have done something like this? I don't know how you can forgive me…you shouldn't have to. I shouldn't have done that; you didn't deserve it." How could anyone beat the one he loved? It was insanity. I was certifiably insane.

"You choose now to be stubborn?" he replied, laughing softly. "You know that when I say I'm fine, I'm fine. Besides, you're not going to really hurt me, you can't. You couldn't let yourself or you would've done it years ago. Didn't even break anything, and I know you could crack bones easy as a snap of your fingers."

"You trust me too easily," I growled. "To believe someone like me won't kill again? Won't kill you with the right incentive? I was so angry with you…What if it happened again? I can't live with myself if I'm going to do this to you every time something makes me mad." Maybe I was better off dead.

He stared at me, his gaze serious now. His eyes looked black in the darkness, his skin white as bone when more lightning flared in the sky.

"Stop it. You're always doing this." He growled, patronizing.

"Excuse me?"

"You're always blaming yourself for things, things that aren't your fault."

"Are you suggesting that this isn't my fault?" Ridiculous, nonsense. Perhaps I'd hit him in the head a few too many times.

"Oh no, you beat the shit out of me, that was your fault entirely, but you didn't just get angry out of nowhere. You're not like that; something someone said made you mad, it could've been me, or Sanzo, or Goku, or, hell, the fucking waitress at the restaurant."

I tried to turn away then, but his hands were still cupping my face. It was impossible, so I casted my eyes down, staring at his stomach.

"I wish you'd said something sooner, instead of letting it build up like this. I would've stayed in if you hadn't been so nasty at supper. Couldn't even have a fun time, threw my whole game off." He hadn't been drinking, or rutting. He'd been playing cards, probably for cigarette money. "Lost the whole pot in two hands; it was embarrassing."

He was trying to joke, it seemed, but I couldn't find it in me to smile. I leaned forward then, and he let me press against him, wrap my arms around his stomach and hold myself close. I shut my eyes and pressed my ear against his heart, even though it must've hurt his bruises. His hands slipped through my hair again, pushing it out of my face, my scalp thrilling at the feel of his fingers.

"Never again," I sighed, "I'll tell you next time, I promise. I'm so sorry. I didn't realize. I didn't mean…I do love you, Gojyo, nothing I said was true. It wasn't even you. It was that damn youkai, what he said. It hadn't meant anything at all, but I couldn't stop hearing it…He said we'd kill one another one day."

I heard him hum, chest vibrating under my cheek. Fingers stilled against the nape of my neck, so warm, so gentle. I felt him kiss my hair.

"That little fucker? Hell, he was just saying things, had no idea we were even a couple."

"I know, but it stuck in my head." I wiped my face on his shirt. The thin fabric soaked up everything. Gojyo sighed and resumed petting my hair.

"We'll just have to kill them faster in the future, so they don't have time to talk." Sound advice, but I wasn't sure how much faster we could get. We usually fought and killed lightning-quick. Perhaps I could figure out a new chi technique…

I found myself dozing off again and started awake. What was the point in sleeping if I was only going to get one or two hours of rest? It wouldn't be the deep-healing kind of sleep that my body needed. My bones would ache for days if I didn't get more than four or five hours every night, that was about as fast as I could heal myself without using up valuable power I saved for emergencies.

Gojyo sighed again and lifted me away, slipping off the bed and motioning for me to lie down again even as he stretched and looked for his day clothes. His shirt was bunched up in a corner, his pants draped over a chair. It took him longer than usual to dress; he winced whenever his left arm was lifted above his shoulder.

I sat there, watching, considering. He'd be useless in a fight that way, he needed both arms to control his weapon, and watching him wince and limp made me flinch in sympathy. I crooked a finger, beckoning him over, and pressed my palms to his bruises, coaxing them to heal until I had exhausted myself and he was as undamaged as he had been yesterday afternoon. Everything in my own body pulsed agony, and he reached past me to pat a pillow and draw back the blankets, inviting me to rest.

"I'll tell Sanzo we'll have to stay another day," he said. Something in his voice said that he'd omit certain details about last night. I nodded silently and lay down, and nearly fell asleep before he'd closed the room's door.

He was back a few minutes later, and I started from my napping when he sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.

"Did he say it's okay to stay here?" I asked, not quite able to keep my eyes open. I saw him smile down at me and felt him touch my lips, as if to tell me to be quiet.

"Yeah. Scoot over. I want to sleep too."

Fin The Fight

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