Serene as death that waits (Challenge: Touch)
Title: serene as death that waits
Author: macavitykitsune
Prompt: Touch
Time taken: 10 minutes exactly, no editing, so gross errors are mine.
Pairing: Ken'yuu/Koumyou, sort of. (spoilers for Burial)
Summary: to live is to be influenced. Ken'yuu has never lived.
Living is easy.
This is the basic truth of your life, that all life is sacred and life is what you make of it and all that philosophical bullshit conceals an empty hand stretched out to the sky begging for meaning, for purpose, for more, more, more.
The truth, though, is that living is easy, and you're at the top of the intellectual food chain of the world and you're the survivor and nothing ever matters.
Living is easy, and living is meaningless, and everything worth doing is already done. Making Sanzo is just another mark, another fleeting purpose, and once it's done (you have no doubt it will be) what then? Another empty title, another empty accomplishment? Nothing challenges you anymore, nothing influences you, nothing touches you or changes you. In a peculiar way, you're the true ideal of Buddhism, the serene river through which all time flows away. You do not seek Nirvana, because the void has already absorbed your being.
And that Goudai (not your master, no one will ever truly be that, you know) holds the sutra of the void, of unmaking and unraveling and nonexistence, is the most sublime irony of all. It would almost be enough to make you believe in fate.
But really, what underlines your every thought, your petty defiances and your glorious ambitions, is that nothing affects, nothing alters, nothing changes, nothing, nothing.
Nothing, but the cell is cold around you, his warm voice in your ear, the hair that shines like moonlight and that maddening cryptic smile that holds your attention captive as the nothingness has never done, and you crave. For the first time, you crave.
You look down again at the bruises on your wrist, more final somehow than any slap from an angered monk or any caress from the brothel women you seek out to destroy, and the realisation is a shock in your mind -
At last, at last, you have been touched by something, and you want nothing more than to destroy it.