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Wukong sees ghosts.
Often he sees them in his nightmares, with blurred faces and incoherent voices that come in mixtures of agonizing screams or tearful moaning. They come in impossible proportions with hollowed cheeks and pale skin, more of how Sun Wukong last saw them but always more.. off.
They're not always the same ghosts, but there are some that do come back. He pretends to not recognize them.
Until a new ghost appears that he cannot ignore.
This one haunts his daydreams, and the corners of his eyes.
He first met it by the river, where he was washing his bloodied hands and fur. The crimson muddled the clear waters a dark, dirty color.
From the muddled water, shapes took the form of a messy yet recognizable figure. Wukong looked down and in the water was his reflection, a reflection with no gold, no fillet, no right eye.
The reflection stared back at him with one single eye, the other a gaping hole with rivulets of blood still dripping from that dark abyss.
The more he stared, the more that abyss seemed to stare back at him too.
His reflection, the ghost, opened his mouth to soundlessly speak to him. The message seen by the Monkey King's eyes on his lips. Its expression was painfully casual and blank, as if it were asking about the weather.
You think you can rid your hands of my murder this easily?
The Monkey King stared at the water, flowing through his fingers and watching the darkness start to fade as his hands and fur got clean. He sits there motionless, thinking, thinking and thinking. The fillet presses against his forehead, heavy even without the sutra.
He doesn't have an answer even after the water clears, and the darkness is gone.
The journey goes on, and the ghost keeps coming back.
He sees it in rivers and mirrors, where his own face looks back at him in its familiar haunting matter. Thanks to this, Wukong has stopped looking at his reflections.
But the ghost doesn't go away.
It comes back from the inky shadows that follow his footsteps, he sees how his own shadows lag behind his movements as if they were their own creature.
It comes back from the cracks that line the earth from each battle, laying like a worn puppet cut from its strings and left to dust. It stares up at the sky with a face too clear and vivid for comfort.
The ghost is unlike all the others he's seen, different from the blurry faces and uncanny proportions that come from how his memory is so warped. Time is able to ebb away at the fine details that the ghosts hold, if he's lucky enough they eventually come to fade away.
Despite time passing, other ghosts appearing, this ghost stays the same as he first met it by the river. Unchanging and forever steady in its haunting.
The ghost feels too real compared to the rest. It becomes too easy to let anger bubble and fester from that realness, and when that anger peaks, he finds the answer to satiating it to be violence.
He reaches for the ghost sometimes, fingers curled into fists and ready to break, to kill whatever dared crawl up from the disgusting void. In this blinding red moment, he is uncaring of everything else until he sees himself in that single eye, repeating history.
Wukong remembers himself, he blinks and finds himself punching air. The skin of his palms is cut open by his own claws, clenched angrily in his moment of rage.
The ghost wears a face burned not only in his mind, but in his heart as well.
Wukong thinks he won't ever forget, so the ghost won't go away soon.
(He thinks he won't ever forgive himself, after all.)
The journey is over, and Wukong was right.
He returns back to Flower Fruit Mountain, and the ghost trails behind him and follows his lead back home.
The ghost still looks the same, but different. Its cheeks less hollowed out and its skin a little less pale. It looks less like it was made of shadow, and more like flesh.
He sees the ghost outside of reflections and shadows.
Instead he sees it lounge in tree branches, less like a motionless corpse and more like someone who was resting peacefully under the shade.
Sometimes he sees the ghost with his subjects, it watches as they play and tumble around the mountain. When he looks closer, the ghost is showing the faintest smile.
His brothers too, have turned into their own ghosts after the journey. They are much less haunting, and more melancholic than anything. They are less ghosts and more of allusions, glimpses of them in his everyday life.
He sees his master in sunbeams and gold, a figure of light and guidance despite everything. He sees Ao Lie in the clouds and grass, a smile ever-present in his expression. He sees Sha Wujing by river streams and waterfalls, their current gentle as they reflect the blue sky. He sees Zhu Baije in.. dirt. He wouldn't have minded if the ground he walked on had the pig demon's face instead.
By campfires, he sees them all. Sometimes he sees the ghost staring at them, one eye and one void holding an unreadable gaze.
One day he sees the ghost at the front of his house, it sits with its back facing Wukong. The ghost is looking at a rock, a rock he knows well. It places a finger on the shapes and colors scrawled on it, they have faded with the centuries that have passed but nonetheless they are still visible.
Wukong watches as the ghost slowly turns it's face towards his direction and he almost drops to his knees right there. What looked back at him was not the void and gold, but instead the two gold eyes of his most precious person. It was nothing like the corpse he was so used to seeing but instead it was his bestest friend he knew long ago, when times were happy and simple.
Because he can't help it, the monkey walks over towards the ghost. It doesn't go away like it usually does and instead stares at him passively before giving him a sad smile and soundlessly speaking to him.
What happened, Peaches?
Wukong drops down onto the Earth, hands pressing against his eyes, and screams.
It was seeing the face of the ghost- no, Macaque, his best friend, unmarred by their battles and clean of his greatest sin, that allowed him to remember. For the first time in centuries, Wukong let himself mourn.
With his emotions finally bursting free, like a dam had been broken open, Wukong cries. Years and years of pent up sorrow all but spilling out in the form of screeches and sobs. An ugly thing it was, for the Great Sage Equal to Heaven to continuously cry like a small child.
He realized then, that from the very bottom of his heart, he regretted killing Macaque. He regretted lashing out at his beloved friend, blinding him and taking his life as if he were a worthless demon.
But Macaque was anything but a worthless demon, because he was the moon to his sun, his soulmate, someone he considered his other half.
Grief and despair washed over him in waves until he was submerged in it, like a stone monkey in the ocean and forced to sink, and sink, and sink. The saltwater burning his eyes and his throat as uncontrolled sobs continued to wrack his immortal body.
He missed him. Gods, He missed him so much.
But for everything the ghost is, he isn't Macaque.
Macaque is long gone, and it's all his fault.
(He regrets every bit of it, and the realization feels heavy on his mind. Like a crushing mountain, like a golden fillet.)
Immortality, Wukong had learned, was a painful, lonely thing.
Time erodes everything, eating away at the world like waves crashing against land and rock. A little bit at a time, repeatedly and constantly, time always brings change.
He doesn't know how long it took for him to stop crying. For all he knew it could have been hours, or it could have been days. But eventually, his tears stopped leaking and his voice was gone, both thoroughly exhausted from his episode.
Wukong spent a bit longer looking down at his hands on his lap, the numbness washing over him like a thick haze. He thinks he could see the ghost from the corner of his vision, kneeling beside him as if to provide Wukong with even the smallest comfort.
Of course even when Wukong knows he shouldn't be allowed this, knows that his sins are unforgivable, knows that first and foremost he should be guilty for Macaque's death that he brought with his own hands-
He still wants Macaque by his side, telling him that things will be okay.
Wukong was a selfish creature like that.
(But he thinks he's always been selfish when it comes to Macaque.)
Eventually, after what felt like weeks of kneeling on the soil, he slowly starts to pick himself up from the soil. One leg then the next until he's standing up again. There is an ache to his legs from how long he was kneeling, a dull throb that settled under his skin, but he found that he couldn't care less.
Wukong feels like he'd been hollowed out, an empty shell of what remained of him after pouring out everything his emotions had to offer. A porcelain doll scrapped clean of its insides where not even echoes could be heard. He doesn't think he's ever felt like this in his centuries of being alive, not even with his brothers dying.
His thoughts are broken when he picks up on the sound of worried chirping from behind him, turning around his eyes widened as he sees small monkeys crowding around behind him looking at their king with worried gazes.
How long have they been sitting there, watching him quietly? Looking so afraid?
Wukong offers his subjects a tired, uneasy smile. He opens his arms towards them and the monkeys barrel into him, crawling all over their king and fretting over him.
Right, first and foremost, he was still the Monkey King. He has subjects that still need him and worry about him.
So Wukong, despite everything, continues to live.
One limb at a time, he learns to move through grief. Wukong picks himself up day by day, one step at a time. It's hard at first, the raw emotion still coursing through his mind and a paralyzing weight on his person. Sometimes he barely manages to even get out of bed.
But being immortal, he will always have another day to live. Another chance to pick himself up and keep trying.
The ghost still lingers around him, sometimes it makes it harder for him. Its presence is still enough to make him ache, but still, Wukong perseveres.
He's had lifetimes of mistakes, and he doesn't think he'll be forgiven for a lot of them. He'll constantly be reminded of what he can't take back in the form of this one, painfully familiar ghost.
But for all it's worth, Wukong is a stubborn monkey, he's already done so much to reach this point.
So he'll live.
(Maybe with time, it'll hurt a little less.)
Centuries pass, and the ghost still remains, but Wukong's learned to expect that.
On most days, his best friend's ghost is like how he remembered it before the journey, before he had ruined everything between them. A familiar passive figure that lingers in his shadows, waiting for his king's orders. Sometimes he feels old habits crawl back to him, in the way his eyes flick towards the darkness after a horrid joke and his tail brushes against his shadow, waiting for another to curl against it.
On bad days, the ghost looks at him with the face Macaque wore when he last saw him. Each wound and scar perfectly ingrained into memory. It's still a vision that brings bile up to the back of his throat, alongside the feeling of boulders weighing in his gut.
He's learned that it barely gets easier to think about. But that's still progress right?
Over the years he's had his ups and downs and has learned to live through all sorts of things, but becoming a mentor was a development that was still unexpected in his immortal life.
MK's appearance was a sudden one, he didn't think that whatever he's seen throughout the years could have prepared him for a human that could wield his staff, let alone prepare him to teach his very own successor.
As much as he initially wanted to fall into an easy life of retirement (like he already wasn't living a lazy life of barely doing anything), he knew that letting the kid go with just a brand new staff and invincibility wouldn't end very nicely.
In a way, he sees his old self in MK. The kid was all youthful recklessness mixed with divine power, something he's already seen bring mess after mess since MK defeated the Demon Bull King. He hopes that with training, MK will learn not to repeat Wukong's mistakes.
One day, Wukong noticed that MK seemed to be more.. on edge. He knows that MK has been growing more frustrated with him lately, the constant reminders of patience and focus seemed to be getting on his nerves. The kid was more relentless and ruthless with each move and strike, improving too fast all at once.
Something was off.
He confirmed it when MK had used too much power than he had taught him, their confrontation resulting in MK turning away from him, a foreign power thrumming under his skin. It reeked of something malicious.
Wukong contemplated for a few moments on what exactly he should do, he couldn't just leave MK to thread this path of self destruction. Putting himself together, he decided that he needed to follow MK and find out for himself what or who exactly was messing with his successor.
Upon reaching the mountain, he almost froze up at the sight of a very familiar figure facing his successor. It was the ghost of Macaque, that had haunted him unchangingly looking at MK and speaking with him.
That couldn't be right, after all, nobody else saw the ghost other than himself. Not even the monkeys at Flower Fruit Mountain took a solid glance at him on their own. They only seemed to look when their king's gaze seemed to linger at a single patch of shadow.
When Wukong went closer, he was met by the sound of a very familiar voice reaching his ears. As smooth and smug as it was in his memories. Wukong never thought he'd ever hear that voice as long as he kept on living.
After all, the ghost never made a sound in its centuries of haunting.
It took half a mind for Wukong to push out his thoughts about ghosts and haunting, focusing on the task at hand. His successor was in danger, ghost or not, he knew better than to let those thoughts stop him from letting MK get killed by the other monkey's hand.
After the fight, Wukong flees. There is nothing trailing after him this time.
He locks himself in his hut, slamming the door shut and pressing his back against it like someone's out there chasing him and ready to knock it down at any moment. He lets himself slide down against it until he's sitting down with his back against the door.
When had he started breathing so heavily?
Wukong put a hand to his chest trying to calm himself down, but it does nothing to calm the racing thoughts in his mind that all circle back to one ghost. A ghost whose voice he was able to hear. A ghost whose hands he was able to touch.
Feeling the other's skin and warmth under his fist made him stagger in his movements, the thought of killing Macaque for a second time making him almost stop the forces of his punches.
In all his years of immortality, of bitterness, of grieving, of relearning how to live, nothing could have prepared him for this.
Nothing could have prepared Wukong for when the ghost he’s learned to grieve and mourn for, his most precious person he’s learned to live without, comes to live again.