Ephemeral

A/N: gift-fic for Eyes of Shinigami: excellent writer, thoughtful reader, new-found friend. Happy Birthday!

The thought had appeared, ringingly clear, in his mind seven days ago. It had popped into his head one quiet evening after dinner, loud and impossible to ignore (exactly like Goku), spoken in a strangely young and hopeful voice.

He noticed it immediately, of course. He had a knack for knowing when thoughts in his head weren't his, sharpened by long practice at distinguishing Goku's thoughts from his own – not, he thought wryly, that that was very difficult, since their thoughts were nothing alike. This thought was not his – most definitely not his, he would never ever think such a thing – so it could only be the monkey.

It had startled him so badly that he jerked, and looked up accusingly to meet Goku's eyes. The monkey had been darting glances at him from across the room in between a card game with Gojyo, and he had looked completely bewildered by the arctic glare he had suddenly been subjected to. He had looked even more confused when Sanzo marched over wordlessly, hit him several times with the fan – hard – and stalked off to spend the rest of the night in his room, chain-smoking and brooding.

Even now, he wasn't sure whether Goku had even consciously thought what he had.

And now it just stood there, patient and silent and incongruous as an elephant in a ballroom, waiting for him to respond, maybe even to accept.

Like hell he would.

Once the initial bewilderment had passed, shock set in, and was almost immediately replaced by anger. He had wreaked tremendous amounts of havoc on the monkey, and Gojyo had caught some as well since he was too stupid to dodge, and because he looked entirely too happy and Gojyo being happy was virtually indistinguishable from Gojyo being intolerable. Hakkai would have been spared, since he was interesting company (not to mention he was the only one who had two working brain cells, and thus had to remain immune to the infamous fan in case it beat them out of him) but his irritatingly complacent smirk – he knew, the duplicitous backstabbing treacherous slippery snake knew why he was so upset, he'd wormed it out of Goku somehow in that insidious way of his – had ensured that he was in for his fair share of it as well. Gojyo was the only one who looked surprised at his foul mood (and that was only the first day; after that, he merely smirked and shared those infernal cryptic glances with Hakkai), which only made him more certain.

He really hated it when those two came over for a holiday. As much as he lik– mis– was not unhappy with their presence – they had a knack for making his life incredibly complicated. And the whole lovey-dovey thing they had going was making him sick. One would've thought Hakkai would have better taste.

That phase lasted for two days, until it was replaced by non-communication. His newspaper was very useful in hiding his face, and comments were greeted with grunts, shouts or whacks depending on who had made them. The paperwork juggernaut that relied on him ground to a virtual halt at this point.

The fact that Goku seemed completely unaffected by his behaviour only made it exponentially worse.

Damn the monkey, he must have been listening – and Sanzo didn't even want to think about how he had learnt that, where he had learnt that and from whom – because when he slipped quietly into Sanzo's room seven days later, there was an air of quiet determination in his expressive eyes; the infamous We-Need-To-Have-A-Talk look, though not combined with the sheepish puppy-like head-scratching his usual antics inspired. Clearly, he was not there to discuss the curious absence of peaches noted by the monks last morning.

'Sanzo,' he said softly.

The blond lowered the newspaper and peered at him through his glasses. 'Go away or die.'

In response, Goku plonked himself down gracelessly on the chair opposite his, glaring defiantly at him across the small table. He didn't speak, he didn't have to.

Sanzo felt a brief stab of irritation. Since when had he started not obeying direct orders? He shuffled the papers – one was poking out at an angle – and retreated behind the newspaper again.

'Sanzo……'

Why was he letting the sentence trail off like that? It made him remember what he'd said, and that was not good at all. If only he'd confess to being hungry again so Sanzo could hit him or swear at him and they could slip back into comfortable routine. 'If you can't be silent, leave.'

'Don't you have anything to say?'

He gave Goku his best Glare. It had no effect. Damn it, he wasn't supposed to become impervious to the Glare. People were supposed to wet themselves when faced with the Glare. Brave youkai trembled and ran – well, not anymore, he was officially in charge of human-youkai relations now, and that would have looked bad – but in the old days, when they were all more cuckoo than a Swiss clock, they would have run like the spineless nitwits they were.

Maybe that was why Goku wasn't reacting. Damned monkey had grown a backbone at some point. Which was regrettable but inevitable, he supposed. It was all very well for Goku to grow up (some part of him shuddered at the thought) but he was supposed to stay the same with Sanzo. Wasn't supposed to change.

He lifted the newspaper between them again, but it was inadequate as a shield. He could feel golden eyes boring evenly through them as if they didn't exist, poking through paper into Sanzo's brain.

Well, they had no right to look in there.

'Stop that,' he snapped.

'Stop what, Sanzo?'

'You know damn well what, you idiot monkey.' He bent forward across the table, a surge of hostility rising up in him.

'Is this about what I said?'

'Oh, you think?' Sanzo retorted.

'What's wrong with what I said?' Now Goku looked puzzled, and hurt. 'Hakkai didn't think it was wrong when I asked him……'

A hundred reasons raced through Sanzo's mind, and he seized upon the one thing he was sure could not be refuted. 'Look at yourself.'

Goku clearly hadn't expected that. 'What?'

'You fool,' Sanzo snarled. There was a mirror on the wall, a small one, meant only to shave by, not to indulge his vanity; that was one sin he didn't care for. Well, it would do. He grabbed the monkey by his arm – Goku didn't even resist, too taken aback – and dragged him over to the mirror. He gripped his chin in four harsh fingers and forced him to look in it, his face cheek-to-cheek with the blonde's. 'Do you see?'

A crease in that youthful brow. 'See what, Sanzo?'

He made an incoherent sound of frustration. 'Look at yourself, you……! You haven't aged a day since we came back from the journey west.'

But Sanzo had. There were fine crow's feet on his eyes, three sharp defined lines in his forehead. Silver mixed with blond now. Not a bad combination; even at forty-five, he was still a striking man, but he looked older. Older, certainly, far, far older than the apparent teenager who stood beside him.

'Do you see?' he said, and stepped back. He hadn't been able to summon up his customary venom in that last sentence. He hadn't really seen his own age in such stark comparison before, never placed himself so closely against the most immediate reminder of his youth, and even he was a little shocked by the difference.

Goku stared into the mirror for a second longer, and then his brow cleared. Incredibly, he smiled. He really was an idiot. 'Is that all?'

'All?' His hand was twitching, itching to summon the fan and beat the bejeezus out of the jackass. He could almost feel its delicious weight in his hands, waiting to crash down on a thick, solid head. 'All? Look at me! Look at you! How can you possibly not notice–' he took a deep breath. 'I'm going to die. Maybe in forty years, maybe in fifty. But you……you don't even look twenty yet. You're going to live a long time. A few millennia, maybe.' Alone, he wanted to finish, yet somehow he couldn't. That was too cruel even for him, and probably a lie. Goku always found what he needed; it was a talent he had – and Goku needed to be not alone. He would find people. Other people.

'But it's really simple, Sanzo,' Goku said, strangely quiet. 'I lived before you, and I know I can't live without you. So even if you're not there with me, you're there, and that means I can find you again, right? You found me.'

'It's not that simple,' Sanzo snapped, neatly evading the indirect confession that statement contained. As if the idiot ever knew what he was saying anyway.

'It's exactly that simple,' Goku said severely, as if he were the teacher and Sanzo a recalcitrant student. 'I always knew you were there, even if you couldn't find me. Why would I keep calling if I thought nobody would hear?'

He was fairly certain his jaw was doing something disgraceful now, like hanging open in a fine impression of a dying fish. He snapped it shut with an effort.

'Weren't you looking for me, Sanzo?'

'I wanted to shut you up.'

'But you did look for me.'

'No,' he hissed.

'Yes,' Goku replied, inexorable as a earthquake. 'It's true, isn't it, Sanzo? You were looking for me, just like I was looking for you. And you found me. And I found you. And we will, again.'

'I doubt that with every fibre of my being.'

'I'm here, Sanzo.'

'You wouldn't be if I had any choice,' Sanzo grumbled, turning his head to light his cigarette.

Again with the grin.

'Bullshit.'

Sanzo's head swung to face him so fast he nearly got whiplash. The unlit cigarette fell to the ground. 'What?'

'I said bullshit. You don't mean a damn thing you're saying.' He leaned in, openly confrontational, with that wide, stupid grin firmly fixed onto his wide, stupid face. 'It's just habit to push everyone away, isn't it, Sanzo? You don't even have to think about it any more. It's so normal for you to be scared of people that you can't let them get close to you even when you want to. And the whole time you push, you're just trying to see whether they'll really go away; and when they do you just use that to convince yourself you did the right thing because they would have left even if you hadn't. Well, I'm calling you on it. You haven't pushed me away yet, and you can't. So.' He looked ridiculously pleased with himself for a second before he moved away, just in time, because Sanzo's hands were twitching as ominously as his eye. 'Hakkai actually said something like that – that what you said was……' his brow squinched up. Goku's vocabulary hadn't expanded any. 'Open to interpretation,' he said with relief. 'Yep, that was it.'

He was going to kill that green-eyed weasel. Kill him dead in the most painful way he could concoct, resurrect him and do it again. And he would never ever allow those two to come over again. 'Did he put you up to this?'

'Still pushing,' he smirked and stepped closer.

'Answer me!'

'Still pushing.' Another step.

'You don't know what you're saying.' He was not going to back down before this monkey.

'Still pushing.' They were nose to nose now, or nose to throat, actually, but Goku didn't look remotely fazed by that. 'You really don't have to bother, Sanzo. It doesn't work anymore.'

Sanzo was shaking, with anger and discomfort and too many things to sort through. 'Move. Away. From. Me.'

'Okay.' To his surprise – great, now he was surprised when Goku listened to him – the monkey moved away, though that irritating smirk never left his face. 'Okay. I will. But I hope you know it's too late now. I already know. And I won't stop trying to get closer.'

'Shut up. Just……shut up.'

'Can't make me,' Goku snickered and stepped back further. 'I know what you're really trying to say now. And I'll make you say it, no matter how long I have to wait.'

And even after he'd let himself out of the room, those words lingered in the air as if they'd been written in fire. I know what you're trying to say. Sanzo tried to sneer in disdain at his blatant stupidity and failed; tried to hate him for growing up and failed even worse.

He couldn't deny what Goku had said. The monkey filled in the emptiness with his thoughts and presence and antics and sheer zest, and Sanzo wanted that as badly as he had ever wanted anything that he denied himself. He made Sanzo live, forced him to respond to life (if only by being an idiot) tricked him, almost, out of his habitual apathy. And in the (relative) privacy of his mind Sanzo could accept that he wanted that.

Sanzo had been looking – even if he didn't know what he was looking for. And he had been found – by the last person he would have expected, and the best he could have hoped for.

He could admit that to himself, at least, if not as readily as Goku had admitted it to him.

He sighed and put the newspaper away, staring at the stubbornly clear and pretty night sky.

Goku had said that he would find Sanzo again, no matter how long it took – no matter how long I have to wait. And Goku was indomitable when he set his mind to doing something; Sanzo wouldn't put it past him to track down every single one of his reincarnations somehow, and worm himself into all their lives with the same ease and persistence with which he'd mysteriously made himself such a…… necessity to Sanzo.

He could still hear those words in his mind, could feel them resonate within him, clear and warm green-brown, as Goku himself was, powerful and determined: we'll always be together, right?

He tried very hard to believe that the prospect dismayed him, and in that, perhaps, he failed most miserably of all.

A/N: well, that was supposed to be shounen-ai, but it's actually……pretty gen, now I read it again. Sigh. Best laid plans and all that. Still. EoS, hope you like it!