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The town they stopped in for the night was cute. As cute as something like a town could be, anyway — it was full and lively, with people of all kinds milling about the streets, making it feel alive and shifting. Other than that, it was like most towns; a business district and residences that sprawled out into the expanses of open farmland. There were really only two things that made it stand out — first, that it was at the base of a low plateau that step-staired into the mountains, and second, that they hadn't been here when Kougaiji's men came through.
And just outside of view, on the other side of the hills, laid the ruins of the city they had.
That Sanzo was the one to come and find him was surprising — in a way that hurt — and was just as unsurprising — in a different way that hurt.
He knew it was Sanzo without having to think about it. From Goku's perch on the hood, feet set on the bumper, he could feel Sanzo's presence as much as his tangible senses could pick him out from everything else in the world — nothing else looked, sounded, smelled like Sanzo. Nothing else felt like him, either.
"Hakkai's gonna be pissed at both of you," Sanzo said from where he settled, leaning against Jeep's headlight.
Goku had known that when he climbed into the driver's seat. But Jeep was just as complicit; it wasn't like he was the type of transportation that could be stolen. If Jeep didn't want to let someone drive, he had plenty of ways of making sure they couldn't.
Without a response, Sanzo lifted his face to follow Goku's line of sight out to the horizon, darker purple and blue to the south, the lights of the city starting to flicker into windows and down the lines of the business district streets and shops.
The feeling of something smooth and cold biting at his skin pulled Goku out of the depth of his thoughts, brought him back a step or two into the physical world again, where Sanzo had rested the side of a bottle against his arm, holding the neck loosely in between his fingers, palm up. Goku took it and, without considering otherwise, popped the cap off of the beer with his teeth.
From his side, he heard Sanzo begin the tiny ritual of lighting up a cigarette, and noted that he didn't hear anything else, which painted a pretty clear picture of how miserable he had to have looked, if Sanzo wasn't going to bitch about his manners.
Sometimes, even in his own cold, detached way, Sanzo was kind in exactly the right way.
"… How far out do you think we were?" Goku asked softly, taking a deep pull right after.
Burning paper crackled with Sanzo's drag.
"Would it have happened if we never came this way? Like this, I mean." Goku looked down, hanging his focus on the way his heels sat on Jeep's front bumper. "…Do you think we killed more people than we saved?"
"It's better not to think of that kind of thing, Goku," Sanzo answered, his voice sounding distant. "We did what we had to do to stop the end of the world."
Goku sighed and took another drink. "Both things can be true huh?"
"Hah," Sanzo barked, just as sharp around the edges as Goku's nerves felt.
"Na, Sanzo," Goku started again, after a few minutes of not-awkward but not-comfortable silence passed. "Shouldn't it be easier by now?"
Sanzo hummed, exhaling in a deliberate way that telegraphed his purposeful choosing to do things at the exact pace he was doing them.
"No," he finally said. "Not for you. It won't ever get easier for someone like you."
"What does that mean? Someone like me? Like me, how?"
"Soft. Naive. Trusting."
It felt like being punched, aching and stinging, making the hairs down the back of his neck stand on end, and Goku took a forceful drink instead of immediately replying. Not that it made a difference to take that pause before speaking, since Sanzo wasn't done.
"You're always going to get your feelings hurt like that."
"I'm not a fucking kid, Sanzo," he snapped, and heard Sanzo's robes shift, indicating he had crossed his arms.
"Did I say you were?"
Dammit. Goku heaved a sharp sigh and sank forward, bracing his face into his hand, elbow propped up on his knee.
"No," he conceded, mumbled. "I guess not."
"Goku."
That defensive static in his skin condensed itself into his chest and belly. It wasn't like Sanzo never said his name, but he never said it like that — with that weight and intensity to it, and it made his insides go all squirmy and fluttery, made his stomach tight in a way that he wanted to stop both immediately and never.
"Why were you chained up in that cave?"
For the first time since he had joined him, Sanzo focused his gaze on Goku where he sat. Being fully regarded by Sanzo was an entirely physical sensation that he dispatched with the same expert discretion he used the Smith and Wesson, and the same snap of directive boomed underneath its dispatch: pay attention.
Goku paused. He met his eyes, and chastised himself for expecting to find a clue to what he was getting at there. He knew better than that after all these years.
"I don't remember."
"You told me that you were sure you'd done something terrible."
"Well, yeah," Goku said. He shrugged, careless. "Seemed like the best guess? More now, since I know what happens if I lose my limiter…"
"That's why it's never gonna get easier. Not for you, anyway." Sanzo's tone was perfectly matter-of-fact, devoid of an actual accusation. It was just a truth, direct and obvious.
And for Goku, it was another blow that boiled that fluttery-good warmth back up to take up too much in his chest and burn his face and ears. He clenched his fist against his jeans and swallowed. Naive. Soft.
Not a kid, no, but no better than if he was.
"If I can manifest that damn thing while you're tearing things up," Sanzo continued, disdain building over every syllable until it was practically dripping from his mouth, "then what the fuck was stopping literal gods?"
Goku shifted, as if that would alleviate the itch in the back of his mind where he could feel that thought hooking into his brain like a burr.
"I always thought…" he started, but even before he could finish the thought, he knew it didn't make sense. I always thought it was because I was just too strong. But then, if that had been true, why was Sanzo able to stop him? "Just" a human might not have been quite accurate to describe what Sanzo was, but at the end of the day, what Sanzo was was human. His power of divinity was limited by how many degrees of second-hand separation it had passed through before it was bestowed upon him, and his strength was limited by a physical fragility that no amount of conditioning or training or stubbornness would overcome.
Why couldn't he have been stopped, first?
「I'll kill you, for your sake.」
"A reasonable authority would have killed you. But no. They threw the damn thing back on — because they always could — and shoved you under a rock to forget about for a few hundred years."
The cave, even so many years later, haunted the floor of every memory Goku had, yawning under his feet like an abyss — cold, empty, dark, lonely — of warning. He had been put there with no understanding, once. That meant he could be again, and if he forgot…
He curled in on himself in reflex, drawing his knees and shoulders up.
That reflex, even so many years later, still grit against something in Sanzo like sandpaper, if the curl of his lip away from his teeth and the way his fingers gripped at his robes was any indication.
Goku had never understood why — of all things — making himself smaller, shying away from the world like that made Sanzo so demonstratively mad. Then again, everything made Sanzo mad under the right circumstances, so Goku had eventually had to give up wondering; he'd have gone crazy before he'd made any of those square Sanzo-sense pegs fit into what looked, to him, perfectly round holes in his logic.
"What does that have to do with it?"
"You still think people are good, for some reason," Sanzo grumbled. He dropped the filter of his cigarette to the ground and dug his heel of his boot down against it until he'd worn a shallow impression into the dirt. "You still expect it. Soft. You're so soft. Trusting. If getting betrayed like that didn't break you of it, nothing can."
It wasn't betrayal, Goku wanted to snap, but bit his tongue against it. How he was supposed to explain how he knew that, knew that like he'd kept his name, he had no idea, and that argument would just make Sanzo angrier. Something in that, about Sanzo thinking such a thing, felt so wrong, the last thing he wanted to do was give him a reason to double down, so he tried to smooth down the tight buzzing of insult under his fingernails.
"Hnh," he managed, barely, and found an excuse in taking another drink.
"A reasonable person would have been angry," Sanzo continued, even though every time he said the word reasonable, he sounded like he would have preferred to shoot the very concept. "But not you. You didn't want a pound of flesh. You were fully left alone to die, and it made you scared."
Goku paused with the bottle pressed to his lips.
Angry.
He'd never been angry, that he could remember. Sad, yeah, of course. Scared… confused, lonely, but never angry. Not in the way that would have made him want revenge, and definitely not the kind of revenge Cho Gonou and Kouryuu had let devour any of the light left in their hearts for so long; the kind that involved pain and blood and corpses and digging out parts of themselves to make it stop.
No, he'd never needed that.
Sanzo had brought that light back when he'd found him, and Goku had let himself take it in so deeply he'd almost let it drown him.
"Oh," he said, uncertain. "I didn't think of it like that."
Sanzo's grimace lessened into an unfocused scowl out toward the darkening sky. "You trusted me."
Of course I did, he wanted to say. You took care of me. Even though he had only been —
"You were… I'm the same age now that you were then, right? Just about?"
"Older, now. A year or two. …Or something."
Goku remembered the slow realization that adults had no idea what the fuck they were doing, either, they were just better at faking it and making it like they knew what to do, and how that had been surprising in itself. The second realization that Sanzo was like every other adult in that regard had been foundation-shattering. It felt like a lifetime ago, now, having crept up on him so early in their journey. Long enough that he didn't think much about how wrong he'd been unless something brought it back into focus.
The idea of Sanzo being a kid was sort of ridiculous — every time Goku thought about it, he could only imagine Sanzo as he was now, only smaller — but he had been one, and now, knowing what being newly seen as grown felt like…
No wonder Sanzo saw him as such a burden.
Sanzo pushed off from Jeep's side to circle the front, planting his foot on the bumper to give himself the step to join Goku in sitting on the hood. Jeep wasn't that big, and the limited real estate meant there wasn't much distance that could be kept between them, even if they tried.
Sanzo's arm was warm and real against his side, and it made Goku's brain short circuit. It made him suddenly antsy, suddenly restless in his bones, and for the desperate need to do something, with his hands, he lifted the mostly-finished beer up on offer. Sanzo took it with a grunt that mostly passed for gratitude.
"Passable. Barely," he said, after a drink.
Goku laughed. "You bought it!"
"For you. And you have shit taste."
He snorted, and let Sanzo finish the beer, despite his grumbling about it.
I'm not the same person I was yesterday, Sanzo said, whenever he changed his mind. As he'd gotten older, Goku could see the pathways that branched out between them both and their past-selves — a cliffside's distance for himself in the beginning and now, and the winding, unpaved snarl that was whatever he and Sanzo were together. In that sense, it made sense.
But who they had been yesterday still followed them in the scars and shrapnel they carried.
Lost in thought, Goku drifted closer to Sanzo, until he was fully leaned against him, his cheek eventually falling to his shoulder. Sanzo shifted, and Goku expected to be thrown off. Instead, he simply moved to make it more comfortable for Goku to lay there, presumably for both of them.
Hold nothing, except for all of the things that could never be let go.
Today is not the same as yesterday, except for all the ways it never changed.
Move forward to save the world, except for all of the dead they left behind.
He could be happy with this, just this, forever: the calming beat of Sanzo's heart and the complimentary cadence of his breathing, slow and deep; all a physical sensation against Goku's body, wrapped up in his scent, his presence.
And he could see ahead of him, where there was an empty river bed carved between now and what he imagined ahead: where he wanted so badly to do more; to slide his hand down to settle on the inside of Sanzo's knee, to draw him closer, down close enough to bury his face in his hair and breathe him in.
Both things, it seemed, would always be true; until one day, when they wouldn't be.