Work Text:
“Did you do the dishes like I asked?”
“Why would I do that when you’d just redo my hard work anyways?”
MK sat in the breakfast nook of Flower Fruit Mountain, fighting the urge to bury his head in the sand, or at least the nearest patch of loam that he could find.
It was not unusual for his mentors to fight. In fact, it seemed to be their collective second-favorite hobby, located right after eating every piece of fruit that they could get their grubby monkey paws on.
Lately, however, it has been getting worse, with both their fuses seemingly cut short and both tempers flaring at the slightest inconvenience. And, once again, stuck with the nonsense, slap-bang in the middle of it all, was MK.
“I can do the dishes if neither of you wants to do it,” he tried to play the peacemaker once again to no avail, and watched in dismay as the pair pressed their foreheads together angrily, neck muscles straining under their fur.
“You’re the worst!”
“No, you’re the worst!”
“I wish you stayed dead!”
“You should've done a better job of killing me then!”
“Oh, I’ll make sure it sticks this time!”
OK, now it was getting out of hand. MK stood up, ready to try his hand at intervention should things escalate to bloodshed, but then he noticed something.
There were no indicators that this was a real fight.
From what Mr. Tang had observed and relayed to him, a genuine fight involved kicking, gouging, screaming, spitting, and, on one unfortunately memorable occasion, half a tail being pulled clean off.
This was different.
Yes, the pair were pressing their heads and gritting their teeth, but their hands were loose, rather than tightly fisted, and as they sidestepped around each other, MK was reminded of how the infants on the mountain would stagger before a playfight.
“Are you guys actually fighting right now?”
They froze, and MK crossed his arms, leaning back in this chair as he tried to recall if there was anything about playfighting in Mr. Tang’s creepily detailed ‘species profile’ on Mystic monkeys.
“Is this like some weird power play? Are you trying to make sure I know how big and scary you guys are?”
The pair separated, having effectively bounced their brain cells between them for just long enough to have a thought, and turned to glare at him, looking like little more than younglings who had been caught sneaking into a place they shouldn’t have, and would thus need to be escorted from the premises.
“He still didn’t do the dishes,” Monkey King jabbed a finger into Macaque’s chest accusingly.
“I don’t care if he didn’t do the dishes, Monkey King. I care that you guys are always fighting, and it’s stressing me out.”
“I didn’t do the dishes,” Macaque admitted.
“Thank you for sharing that, Captain Obvious. I don’t care about the dishes. Do you wanna know what I do care about?"
From the looks on their faces, he could tell that they didn’t, but he continued anyway.
I care about eating my breakfast without having to worry that one of you is gonna be thrown through a wall.”
Their awkwardness was like music, and they reluctantly tugged their heads apart, turning their backs on one another like they really couldn’t be bothered with their fight, which cemented MK‘s belief that they had never been fighting, not even once, through this entire, tiresome charade.
Unfortunately, they were playing.
Play meant they were working together. Play meant they would cooperate on training. And if they were cooperating, it meant that every muscle and MK’s body was soon to be sore, overtaxed, and possibly ruptured by the end of the week.
He almost would have preferred to deal with a fight.
“Just outta curiosity-“ his voice cracked in fear. “What’s the training plan for today, Monkey King? Maybe some practice fights?”
Monkey King turned back to a student and offered a smile. “We were actually thinking-“
There it was.
Not ‘me’ or ‘I’ but ‘we’.
“-That you can do some sets with the staff.”
MK felt like screaming to the heavens. He felt like pulling off a second Havoc in Heaven, or crawling down to the depths of Diyu, crying and screaming, and rewriting his name into the book of the dead so that he wouldn’t have to face his fate. Sets were hell, and Macaque, during his time in the actual hell, seemed to have picked up an innumerable amount of them, which he was only too happy to foist onto his hapless student.
“Don’t you have a wall I could demolish? There’s a bunch of priceless ancient murals still up… I think that one depicting the… uh, y’know, would look really nice if it got demolished!”
No luck.
Macaque spoke next. “How are you supposed to learn fighting techniques by doing household chores?”
“ I don’t know, but Monkey King had me doing them when I was starting out, so there’s gotta be some merit to it, right?”
Macaque turned to Monkey King, looking incredulous, but Monkey King was quick to take one of Macaque’s hands and smooth his fingers over bruised knuckles.
“I was lazy when I first started training him. I’ve gotten better.” He lifted Macaque’s hand to his cheek, then looked up at Macaque with something MK couldn’t name in his eyes, “Promise.”
Macaque huffed, but allowed the contact, and MK, feeling inexplicably like he had intruded on some moment meant just for them, quickly gulped down the remnants of his breakfast, scooted out of the breakfast nook, and hopped up the stairs to Monkey King’s hut, feeling grateful that at least there was some barrier he could use to put distance between himself and his stressors. The door was propped open, and, as he clicked it shut, he took a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. The hut was safe, if a little stuffy, and, once he’d figured out how to handle their insanity, he could emerge easily enough.
Or so he thought. But as he turned to admire the pictures framing the door, he noticed a note taped to the back. He couldn’t help but squint at it.
Neither of his mentors had the best handwriting- Monkey King because of his inability to read, Macaque due to his dexterity issues, and when those combined, as seen here, that dizzying chicken scratch was put on full display by two sets of hands who had clearly never seen the inside of a school. He decided to start the task of translation through Monkey King’s section of notes.
“MK.. Fighting the door… I don’t think that’s right. Ok, what does Macaque’s note say?” He held the note up to the light and squinted one eye, then the other. “Block the corpses.”
Racking his brain, he looked around the small hut for further clues, then looked back to the door. “Block the door… Door blocked… Why does that sound familiar?”
He sat down on the couch to work it out.
“They can’t be doing riddles, can they? That’d be dumb… but then again, maybe a clue to a new power? No… that wouldn’t be right either…”
Outside, he could hear two sets of heavy footfalls running up the stairs, some arguing, and then the unexpected sound of metal shoving into the lock.
“The door’s open, guys!” He called, but then, as the noise of metal grinding into the lock turned frantic, he couldn’t help but worry that they might break it. The door was rather rickety, and since the lock had been around since the late Ming dynasty-
MK looked at the notes again, and it finally clicked in his head what they had meant.
It meant that the fucking door had been blocked again.
Which, in turn, meant that he was locked in.