Chapter Text
Monica hears it from the kitchen; a sudden hush in the tavern's usual murmur of conversation. Someone less experienced might have found it a welcome change, but she knows better. Even the musicians have stopped playing, the twang of a badly played lute echoing loudly in the silence.
She grabs her club from where it hangs by the kitchen door and storms out onto the common room, ready to break up whatever brawl is looming.
"Alright, you lot - " She trails off as she sees what everyone is staring at.
In the tavern doorway is a small familiar blue-clad figure leaning heavily on a walking staff. Except the blue isn't so blue anymore; grubby and worn and split at the seams. The little monk's hair has grown out past its’ previous close cut, now thick and wild and nearly reaching her shoulders.
What makes Monica catch her breath though, is the rippled red scar down the girl's left cheekbone, like someone had struck her a glancing blow that just missed her eye.
"Tripitaka?" Monica breathes, lowering the club.
The girl winces as if it had been some filthy epitaph. "Not quite," she says softly, avoiding Monica’s gaze.
Monica becomes aware of the eyes watching and rounds on the common room. "What the hell are you lot looking at? This isn't a floorshow." Everyone quickly turns away and conversation resumes.
Monica gestures at the girl. "Come into the kitchen, love." Out back she hangs up her club and pulls up a chair by the fire. "Sit down before you fall down. How long since you've eaten?"
"Two days," the girl says, leaning her staff against the wall and sinking shakily into the chair. "But I don't - " Monica shoves a water jug at her and scoops up a freshly baked bread from a tray the cook just pulled from the oven.
"Let that cool a bit," she says, dumping it on a plate in front of the girl. "Small bites or you'll make yourself sick…" The girl is already tearing off bits with shaking fingers and shoving them in her mouth. Monica glares at the cook until he stops staring and gets back to work.
What the hell had happened? The last she’d seen Tripitaka, the girl had been bright-eyed and hopeful, off to save the world with her new friends. This girl who’s come back looks like the world has walked all over her and gotten a few kicks in for good measure.
Monica waits until the girl’s slowed eating before touching her chin, tilting her face so that Monica can see the scar better. It looks like a burn, the scar tissue rippled and shiny.
"That looks recent." Tripitaka doesn't answer and Monica asks the question she's been dreading: "Where are those friends of yours?" The girl flinches again and Monica’s heart sinks as she pulls away. "How did it happen? Fighting demons, I suppose."
"What?" The girl looks startled, then hastily assures her: "No, no. They're fine, they're alive."
"Where are they then?"
"On the quest, I assume. Retrieving the scrolls." The girl tears off another piece of bread, signalling she doesn’t want to talk about it any longer. Monica persists.
"And they let you just come back alone?"
The faintest hesitation. "Yes."
"Did they let you go, or did you just decide to go?"
The girl sighs. "I was asked to leave, Monica. I'll swear it on whatever oath you want."
Perplexed, Monica frowns at her. "Did they find out you were a girl?" She hadn't thought it would matter, but perhaps gods thought about things differently to humans.
"They were fine with me being a girl. They asked me to leave because I had no place on the quest." The girl drops the bread and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, like a fretful child trying to hold in tears. "I'm not Tripitaka. I never was. The Scholar should have told me - " She stops, biting her lip.
"Told you what?" Monica says.
But the girl shakes her head stubbornly. She has the thin, exhausted look of someone on the very edge and unable to go any further without shattering.
"Alright then,” Monica says after a moment. “I'll get you some fresh clothes. You're going to visit the bath-house and take a good long soak, then hop into bed and get some rest."
The girl gives her a teary look somewhere between surprise and gratitude. "I only meant to stop by - "
"Hush up. Like I'd let you walk away looking like that. It's indecent." She plucks at an open seam on the girl's sleeve. "Now. Clothes."
While Tripitaka sleeps, Monica goes through her pack. She feels no remorse; her feeling is that if a young woman goes away fine and comes back a year later ragged, starved and scarred, then it is one’s moral obligation to investigate.
She finds little of interest; some clothes in even worse condition than what the girl was wearing when she arrived and a set of papers in a language that Monica can’t read. She puzzles over the words and decides the girl must have written them herself; they look as if they’ve been scribbled, crossed out, crumpled up and cried over. There’s a few smears like tear-stains here and there.
The girl’s staff isn’t strictly speaking a staff either. It has a broad, blunt metal head like a shovel. Monica’s seen monks carrying them, to either bury bodies by the side of the road or whack sense into brigands. Moon-spades, her mother used to call them. She supposes it’s a better choice than a sword or a polearm. Carry a weapon and some idiot is always going to try to take it away from you. A moon-spade might invite ridicule in some places but it’s a rare fool who cares enough to attack you for it.
Monica is just examining the carvings on the shaft – more odd symbols like those on the papers – when Tripitaka jerks awake with a muffled yelp. She lies stiffly for a moment, like someone trying to recall where they are, then slowly uncurls, sitting up.
“Monica?”
“Just checking your pack for mending,” Monica says. She pokes the pile of clothes with a disdainful foot. “We might be best off putting the whole lot in the rag bin and starting from scratch.”
“Maybe.” Tripitaka agrees, rubbing her eyes.
“Bad dreams?” Monica says. Tripitaka makes a vague sound of agreement. “I’ve got some herbs in the kitchen that’ll knock you right out.”
“No.” Tripitaka’s voice is sharp. After a moment, she adds: “I don’t want things that will… affect me.”
Monica scrutinises her thoughtfully. “Alright then,” she says after a moment. “Just some tea.”
They share a pot of tea until Tripitaka starts nodding off and Monica gently scoops the cup out of her hands before it can spill. She pulls the covers over the girl and leaves her to sleep.
The next morning over breakfast, she dismisses Tripitaka’s vague suggestions of leaving.
“What kind of friend shows up after two years, stays the night, and goes again without a word? A damned rude one, that’s what.”
She’s already stolen all the girl’s clothes for mending and washing, so that all she has is a nightgown. Just to be on the safe side she’s also confiscated her boots. If you could call them boots. After a year of walking and not being very good quality in the first place means they’re more hole than boot.
“I don’t want to put you out,” Tripitaka says hesitantly.
“Do you see anyone else here?” Monica says, re-filling her cup of tea. “Now eat up.”
She has no intention of letting Tripitaka leave before she’s put back on some of that weight she’s lost. The girl had been skinny to start with and now she’s downright gaunt. It’s even more visible in the light of day, with her face clean and her hair properly combed. It makes Monica want to find Pigsy and give him a good hard whack with a frying pan. Monkey and Sandy she’d pegged as unreliable nitwits, but she’d really thought Pigsy had a solid head on his shoulders.
In the meantime she sets about ferreting out what happened. Tripitaka is reluctant to talk about why she left, but she’ll discuss prior events willingly enough. Monica learns that the group of four made it all the way to the Jade Mountain, where together they defeated a demon lord and freed a bunch of gods from captivity. It’s a long and complicated story involving lost languages and shaman and faceless monsters, so Tripitaka has to go back and explain a lot of things for context.
“…so these demons just helped you?” Monica says in confusion.
“Font Demons. And no, not really. I used the hair the gods gave me to compel them.” Tripitaka pauses as if some troubling thought had occurred to her. “I didn’t think about that, that they didn’t have a choice.”
Monica thinks that it’s only fair since demons haven’t given anyone much of a choice in five hundred years and says so. Tripitaka hums in vague acknowledgement before continuing.
“Anyway, after that we journeyed west to find the rest of the sacred scrolls.”
“And then?”
Tripitaka shrugs. “We separated. I came back here. I assume they went on. That’s all.”
“That’s not much of ending, girl. You should polish it up.”
“Polish it up?”
“In your writings. I saw them in your pack, when I took your laundry. Are you writing down your adventures?”
Tripitaka’s face closes off. “No, that’s something… private. A kind of diary.”
Sensing she’s come to the limit of what Tripitaka will say, Monica eases off. “Well, then. Keep up with it. You never know what you might come back to later.”
She can’t spend the whole day fussing over the girl – she has a business to run. So she gives Tripitaka some mending to do and parks her in the corner of the kitchen out of the way. The cook thinks she’s too skinny and keeps trying to feed her tit-bits whenever he thinks Monica can't see. Any girl who's not plump is thin to Jora's mind (his own daughters are curvy like ripe plums) and in this case Monica is inclined to agree.
Monica focuses on her customers, who’ve become even rowdier since Locke left town. She’s reluctant to say anything good about their former ruler, but one thing Locke had done was keep the brigands and mercenaries in line. No one trashed her town or broke her stuff without paying for it. These days, it’s everything the town guard can do to keep things from getting out of hand. Of course, since now people’s money isn’t going straight into Locke’s pocket, hopefully it’s just a matter of time until the numbers of desperate outlaws decrease.
Just a matter of time, Monica reminds herself after the third broken plate.
“Right,” she says, slapping the bill on the rowdiest table. “Who’s paying then?”
The biggest mercenary scowls at the figure. “This is for lunch?”
“Lunch plus the two cups, one plate and large soup bowl you broke. And the cutlery that this gentleman here is hiding in his beard.” She gestures at the red-headed thief, who blushes nearly as bright as his hair.
The mercenary pushes the bill away. “I’m not paying this.”
“I don’t particularly care which one of you pays it, so long as someone does.”
Later she’ll curse herself for not paying attention, when one of the mercenary’s friends shoves her from behind. There are hoots of laughter as beer spills all down her front and she’s just drawing breath to yell when someone hits the floor behind her with a thump.
When she turns around, the man who shoved her is on the ground, his arm twisted to a painful-looking position by a half-starved girl with a scarred cheek.
“Are you alright?” Tripitaka says to Monica. “I saw him push you.”
“Fine,” Monica says, a little dazed. Not so much by the violence as the direction it’s coming from. Beneath Tripitaka, the mercenary curses and writhes, then goes very still as she twists his arm a little more.
“You should lie still,” she advises him. “Much more pressure and it will pop your arm out of the socket.” Her tone is kind, as if she’s offering up some friendly advice. Her grip is casual, no sign of any strain or shaking.
The tavern has gone silent, arrested by the sight of a man effortlessly pinned by a girl half his size in a nightgown. Then the first mercenary gives a deep belly laugh and dumps a bag of coins on the table. “For the show,” he says.
Monica waits until they’ve cleaned up and the disruptive guests departed before dragging the girl out back.
“Since when can you fight?” She demands.
“A while.” When Monica arcs an eyebrow at that uninformative answer, Tripitaka relents grudgingly. “The others taught me some stuff. Pigsy said he was tired of me getting kidnapped all the time.”
“That happen a lot?”
“A few times. But they got themselves kidnapped too, and I rescued them, so really it evens out.” She says it in the tone of a well-worn argument.
“Well then.” Monica smirks. “Looks like you’ve just got yourself a job, girlie.”
Word spreads quickly of Monica’s new bouncer. The tiny little girl with the moon-spade, who can break up a brawl like prying apart mewling kittens. Actually, as Tripitaka says, kittens would be a lot harder because they’d be too adorable to smack. Mercenaries, not so much.
Monica gives her a chair by the entrance, where she spends most of her time reading or darning, the moon-spade resting against the wall. When she has to get up, though, it’s in the blink of an eye and there’ll be a customer on the ground wondering what the hell just happened. Some test her on purpose, but after she throws the first few out the door, things settle down and she becomes more or less part of the furniture.
Monica also takes it as an excuse to get the girl new clothes; boy’s tunic and pants, loose-fitting and easy to move in, solid boots like the town guard wear. She half expects Tripitaka to cut her hair short again, but all she does is clip off the split ends and start braiding it. Once she’s gotten Monica to teach her how to braid anyway.
“How can you have gone your whole life without braiding?” Monica says in disbelief, after the first disastrous attempt.
“I was raised by a man and after that, I kept my hair short.” Tripitaka starts combing out the tangle she created. “I’m not sure Sandy even brushes her hair and Monkey –” She stops as she always does when Monkey comes up.
Monica is starting to suspect that Monkey is at the heart of this mess. A romance gone wrong perhaps? They’re both young and foolish; the kind of age where a broken heart seems like the end of the world. Or at least Tripitaka is; Monic has no idea what age Monkey, or how it would correspond to human development. Not that old, going by his behaviour.
Of course that theory, as nice as it is, doesn’t take into account the nasty scar on Tripitaka’s face. That scar worries Monica, more than anything else. It doesn’t look like the kind of scar from an accident, or even self-inflicted. It looks like the kind that comes from being attacked with an objective to cripple or kill. And it is the one subject that Tripitaka completely shuts down on, refusing to answer any questions and once actually walking away from Monica and not coming back until sunset. Monica had taken the hint and let it go.
She knows that Tripitaka goes out at night, wandering the town with her moon-spade like a lost shade. Once she sees her at the monastery, head bowed as she speaks to the head monk who looks at the girl with an expression somewhere between anger and compassion, and a strange wariness.
It’s a surprise to look up oneday and realise that Tripitaka has been in Pallawa for nearly a month.
“Have you given any thought about what you’re going to do?” Monica asks her. The common room is relatively quiet for once, so Tripitaka’s having her lunch out back in the kitchen.
“What do you mean?”
“With the rest of your life, now that you’ve given up on this quest business.”
Tripitaka frowns, looking down at her bowl. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. What would I do?”
“Lots of things. Get married. Become a soldier. Join a nunnery. Start your own tavern – not in Pallawa, of course.” Monica flicks Tripitaka with the corner of her apron, who smiles a little.
“I suppose I’d like to teach,” she says after a moment. “The Scholar taught me so much. I didn’t realise how privileged I was, to learn it.”
“Not a bad idea. You could apply at the school.”
“I could.” Tripitaka thinks about it. “I don’t know. Me, teaching children. It seems wrong.”
“Why?”
A shrug, which Monica knows by now to be Tripitaka’s tell that she’s, if not outright lying, then evading the real truth. “Well, you know, I’m not very respectable. The orphan girl who posed as a boy and ran away with three gods, and now works in a tavern beating up drunks.”
“This is Pallawa, girl. We can’t be that fussy.” Monica look through the curtains and glimpses someone coming in the front door of the tavern. “New customers. No, you finish your lunch. I’ve got it.”
Tripitaka nods, turning her attention to her noodles. “Call me if you need me.”
Monica dries her hands on a dish towel and sweeps through the curtains.
“Welcome to Monica’s. What can I–” She stops. “You.”
Pigsy looks a bit taken aback by her tone. “Hi, Monica. Long time, no see?” Behind him, Sandy is smiling like she’d been told it was polite but was a little uncertain of the meaning, while the Monkey King – still wearing that stupid crown – folds his arms with an amused smirk.
Monica doesn’t hesitate. “Get out.”
Pigsy blinks. “Um, if this is about the tab –”
“I said get the hell out.” Monica reaches back and grabs her club from inside the kitchen. She makes sure to raise her voice so it can be heard by everyone in the tavern, especially out back. “What kind of scum abandons a teenage girl in the middle of nowhere by herself?”
Pigsy’s face goes blank in surprise, and Sandy looks up sharply. “You know about that?”
“She came through here, a few weeks back, told me all about it.”
Monkey’s smirk has disappeared completely and he steps forward urgently. “Where did she go? Where is she now?”
“None of your damn business, that’s where.” Monica looks him in the eye and spits out the barb she’s been saving up the last month. “You ought to be ashamed. She left here happy and whole and well-fed. She came back here a shadow of herself.”
Monkey flinches as if he’d been slapped.
Pigsy steps in. “Now, Monica –”
“Don’t you ‘Monica’ me! I expected hair-brained idiocy from these two fools.” She gestures at Monkey and Sandy, the latter of whom looks as if she’s trying to decide if she’s been insulted or not. “I never expected it from you.”
“Look, it’s complicated. What’s important is that we find her as soon as possible.”
“We’ve come all the way from Toora,” Sandy interjects. “Can you at least tell us which way she went?”
Monica narrows her eye, trying to gage the god’s sincerity. On the one hand, they had come all this way looking for Tripitaka. On the other, she’d clearly left them for a reason. And there is that scar to consider…
Behind her, something crashes in the kitchen.
Shit.
“What was that?” Monkey says, peering past her.
“Bloody kitchen hand,” Monica says, moving to block his line of sight. “Butter fingers, all of them.” He frowns at her, the wheels turning. He’s not stupid, Monkey, no matter how much he acts like it sometimes.
Then Sandy whispers: “Monkey.” She’s over by the door, reverently picking up Tripitaka’s moon-spade from its customary resting place next to the chair. She holds it out, eyes glimmering with tears. “Wet ash.”
It means nothing to Monica, but it has some significance to Monkey. Startled realisation and a fierce joy sweep across his face, and then he darts around Monica, lunging through the curtains into the kitchen. There’s a yelp and another crash and shouting.
“What are you doing?” Monica yells, charging after him.
She shoves through the curtains to find Tripitaka climbed halfway out the window and Monkey trying to drag her back inside. Since he should be more than strong enough to pull her in effortlessly, Monica can only assume he’s distracted by Jora, who’s hitting him with the fry pan and shouting: “Get off her, you perverted bastard!”
“Ow!” Monkey tries to defend himself from the cook's onslaught with a raised arm. “Ow! Stop that!” He sounds more annoyed than pained, and hasn’t let go of Tripitaka’s legs, despite how she wriggles. “Tripitaka, I’ve come a really long way – ow! – and you won’t even stop and – ow!”
“Let me go, Monkey!” She snarls. “I know how this ends!”
“No, you don’t, that’s the – ow! Will you stop that!” He glares at Jora, who just hits him again.
“Lecher! Depraved deviant!”
Monkey huffs up in offence – “I am not!” – and nearly loses his grip on Tripitaka, who squirms like an eel and is nearly out the window before he lunges and catches her ankle. “Tripitaka,” he pants as the window-frame creaks alarmingly. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to hurt you. Just come inside and we’ll talk – ”
“We already talked!” Her free foot catches him in the face, and even though Jora’s cast-iron frying pan hadn’t so much as put a dent in his perfectly mussed hair, the force of Tripitaka's kick makes Monkey lose his grip and fall on his backside with a thump.
“Ow,” he says, sounding like he meant it for the first time as he gingerly touches his cheek. Monica’s attention, however, is caught by the girl who’s stopped in the window like she can’t decide whether to keep going or stop to check he’s okay.
The girl whose eyes are glowing red like the heart of a furnace.
Abruptly everything about Tripitaka – all the strange things about her since she returned – come together with a resounding ‘click’. Why she left the quest, her ability to curb-stomp experienced mercenaries, even the odd looks the monks give her…
“You’re a demon,” Monica blurts out.
Tripitaka flinches, and that glow blinks out, leaving nothing more than a teenage girl who looks like she’s about to cry. She gives Monica a miserable look, then scrambles out the window and is gone.