Tale as Old as Time

[windfallswest]

Title: Tale as Old as Time
Author: windfallswest
Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Sanzo/Goku
Rating: NC-17, in general. You know, eventually.
Disclaimer: <----
Notes: Also at AO3 How Sanzo and Goku might have met, if Saiyuki were more like Beauty and the Beast (you decide which is which).

This is...not exactly how I'd planned to make my grand premier in the fandom. Not only with the weird, but with the tl;dr. And I wondered why it was taking so long to finish... (Subdivided for your convenience!) I do not hesitate to blame the weird on kispexi2, despite the fact I'm sure she has absolutely no idea who I am. I ran across this thing she made while trolling for fic one day, and the bunny popped up and put a gun to my head.

All hail my magnificent beta, htebazytook.



"What do you mean you promised me to the beast?" Kouryuu advanced on the old man with murder in mind.

Koumyou sucked unconcernedly on his pipe, not even bothering to look at his pupil. Kouryuu thought his brain might actually explode from sheer force of rage.

"You can consider it a part of your training, if you like," Koumyou added after a few minutes' contemplation.

"I'm supposed to spend the rest of my life in the middle of a forest, on top a mountain-how did you even find this place? What is it on the way to, you worthless old fart?-with a shaggy, slobbering beast with the manners of a herd of swine-"

"He wouldn't be the only one," Koumyou muttered dryly.

"-and you have the gall to tell me it's part of my training?"

Kouryuu stood glaring at his master, shoulders heaving.

Koumyou took another drag from his pipe and answered philosophically, "Well, I'm your master, so technically anything I say is part of your training, is."

"There's an easy answer to that," Kouryuu said grimly, drawing and cocking his Smith and Wesson in one smooth motion. It was aimed squarely at Koumyou's chakra mark.

Koumyou looked up at him. His brief sideways glance said, be serious. "What? You'd rather I'd been eaten by a bear that night?"

"You really want me to answer that?" Kouryuu drawled dangerously.

Koumyou let out an unperturbed lungful of smoke.

"Well, it's not like I was going to stay there. And besides, we're a Buddhist temple. You're the closet thing to a beautiful maiden we've got."

Kouryuu felt his eye twitching. He'd been wrong. Now his head was going to explode. Brains all over the porch.

"It's that mountain, over there. To the west." Koumyou gestured with his pipe.

Kouryuu's arm shot straight out and he fired into the woods. All the eavesdroppers ducked. He thought he heard a cat yowl. The fuck's a cat doing out here?

Fucking. West.

"Anyway, it was a long time ago. You can't really do anything about it now," Koumyou continued conversationally.

Kouryuu growled and headed for the larder. He'd need supplies.

"Oh-and Kouryuu-happy birthday."

By this point, Kouryuu was no longer capable of coherent speech, so he merely turned to glare harpoons at his complacent master before stalking away again.

Eighteen. He was eighteen years old, and what did he get? bartered off to some shaggy ape-brain because Koumyou Sanzo was a grade-A kook. Kouryuu glared at the trees and the dusty path and the sunlight.

Kouryuu couldn't even enjoy the peace and quiet away from nattering idiots-shouldn't monks be less annoying than normal people?-because of the voice. The voice had been there for almost half his life. West, it whined. Come west. Come to me. Come find me. Kouryuu didn't know if it was the forest or the voice's increasingly insistent pull, but he found himself walking unerringly in the direction of Mount Gogyo, even though the looming, ancient trees for the most part blocked everything else from sight.

It was not a happy day that saw Kouryuu reach the beast's castle. He had been walking for most of a fortnight, which meant he'd spent the last week and more not being able to sleep for the inevitability of a tree root digging into his back. The higher he went, the cooler it was, and sometimes it seemed that as he rose above the lowland noise, the call echoed louder in his mind.

That last morning it was raining. Kouryuu almost took a perverse pleasure in it: let him look like a drowned rat when he got there. Hell if he was going to make any sort of effort for this perverted jerk. Serve him right if Kouryuu caught pneumonia and died after a week.

Thunder boomed overhead just as Kouryuu was about to knock on the ostentatiously gothic and oppressive gate. He looked up at it. He looked up at the dark, grumbling clouds. The castle wasn't quite above the treeline, and so while the lowering thunderheads shrouded the tops of the highest towers from sight, the heavy, moist east winds still dropped the rains that fed the forest on its grey stones before driving lighter clouds up over the peaks to vanish across the western plains.

"Are you going to stand there all day or what?"

Kouryuu jumped at the sound of the gruff voice. He searched the direction it had come from and saw-the knocker. There was a face on it. It wasn't pretty. He looked around again.

"Well?" the voice grated impatiently, if gravel could sound impatient.

Kouryuu's arm snapped out with his gun, trained point-blank on the knocker. There still wasn't anything else there, but Kouryuu hadn't just fallen off the turnip truck.

"Is that how they say 'please' where you're from, kid?" the knocker asked. "See if I open for you now."

Enchanted castle: strike three. (In case anyone's wondering, strikes one and two were the initial bargain and the telepathic nagging.)

"Your enlightened Lord Fuzzy-Wuzzy is expecting me," Kouryuu said without lowering his gun.

Kouryuu could have sworn the knocker rolled its eyes (all five of them).

"I'm a door, for fuck's sake. D'you think I can actually do anything to you?"

You can close, Kouryuu thought sourly.

"Do I look like an idiot?" Kouryuu muttered aloud. "But if you insist..."

He put his gun up and reached for the knocker. He raised the bar and rapped it down hard on the cranky face's nose. It was, he noticed, a very squidgy-looking nose.

The knocker glared resentfully at Kouryuu. Then it straightened its features and cleared its nonexistent throat. A single hollow boom echoed Kouryuu's knock from somewhere deep within the castle.

"Who seeks entrance to Castle Gogyo?" the knocker declaimed stertorously.

"You've got to be kidding me." Kouryuu stared at it disbelievingly.

"Answer or be denied entry!"

"Fuck that." Kouryuu turned on his heel and started walking back down the path.

He was about two-thirds of the way across the narrow clearing around the castle walls when a sizzling huge ball of lightning fried the gargantuan, gnarled oak standing on one side of the path. Half of the thing peeled conveniently down, blocking his way.

"You've got to be shitting me!" Kouryuu hurled the protest skywards. An unaccompanied rumble of thunder and a tingling feeling that made small hairs all over his body stand on end seemed very much like an answer. Kouryuu spun around again with ill grace and stalked angrily back to the gate.

"Who are you who would to enter Castle Gogyo?" The knocker looked way too smug. Kouryuu grit his teeth.

"I am Kouryuu of the river's flow, student of Koumyou Sanzo."

The gates swung ponderously open. Kouryuu marched grimly past them.

"Uptight prick," Kouryuu thought he heard the knocker grumbled behind him.

Kouryuu maybe smirked a little. He sobered quickly, though. The walk to the keep doors was a long one, over slick cobblestones and past interestingly well-shaped grounds. The rain fell in sheets, driven in swirls by the wind that slipped in and got trapped by the walls.

There were eight high steps, wide enough for four men to walk abreast, leading to the door. It was carved, unrelenting stone. Double doors. It was impossible to make out the figures carved into it, but at least none of them moved. The wind tugged at the hem of Kouryuu's robes. Kouryuu stood there, and the stone scraped open for him, over the wide top step. The edges brushed his shoulders. Inside was dark. He stepped forward.

Get this the hell over with.

The entrance hall was cavernous. The only light filtered in slate-blue through the windows, large ones in rooms opening off to either side and others on the wall behind the grand staircase, blurred by water and muffled into oblivion by cloud and darkness.

"I will be so pissed if no one is here," Kouryuu grumbled to himself.

The door shut itself behind him with a consciously ominous sound. Kouryuu searched the shadows uselessly. Where would this-whoever he was go during a storm? Up to a tower to menace the thunder?

He felt like an idiot standing there like some helpless bimbo, so he wandered up the ridiculous stairs-higher ground-and over to the windows. They were bracketed by long velvet drapes whose colour the lightning rendered merely dark. Kouryuu poked one experimentally with the muzzle of his gun. Satisfied with its inanimacy, he settled with his back mostly to it and stared resignedly out the window.

When it came down to it, Kouryuu was much more concerned about the possibility of the drapes waking up and swallowing him than he was about his host jumping out of the shadows and ripping his throat out. He certainly wouldn't be standing with his face in the light if he were.

No, Koumyou honestly wouldn't have sent him here if he'd expected that. Why hadn't he just used the sutras to blow the scum to nirvana, for that matter? The man simply refused to explain himself, which was more or less necessary because nothing he did made sense.

This just got stupider and stupider the more Kouryuu thought about it. What was he supposed to be doing here?

The thick stone walls muted the storm's noise, leaving Kouryuu alone in eerie silence. Or-maybe not quite so alone. A piece of the shadows clinging to the mezzanine railing detached itself.

Kouryuu ignored it. He'd come this far. The beast could bloody well find him. He wasn't about to go calling after it with quivering voice and heart aflutter.

The movement was closer this time. Kouryuu was not holding his fucking breath. There had been gashes on the banister. They'd caught in the windows' feeble gleam; and Kouryuu hated that his master smoked, but he could really use a drag right now. Or six, which was about as much pipe-smoke he could take. Cigarettes went down smoother, when he succumbed to the urge to poison himself.

A flash of lightning brightened the world fractionally for a split second. Kouryuu clearly heard a gasp not covered by distanced thunder.

"Are you going to stand there gawking or what?" Kouryuu asked, not moving.

That won him a growl that raised every hair he owned. There was an almost inaudible, cat-footed step and then Kouryuu got his first look at the beast.

He wasn't human: that much was obvious. Everything about him was sharp: his ears, his teeth, his fingers, his hair. His eyes, even, deep gold and slashed down the middle.

Youkai. Definitely. Or, something. That look in his eyes barely admitted to thought.

So, what? Has he lost it? Chant up a binding? Try to find his mind?

No. Koumyou wouldn't have left him like this so long... Something didn't feel right.

The beast tilted his head, and something under all that spiky hair caught the light. Kouryuu reached out before he thought-and he froze with his hand on the beast's head. Oh, shit on a motherfucker's dick. He was going to die, right now. Kouryuu braced himself.

The beast looked...baffled? Maybe he was wondering which limb to rip off first. Still not moving. Dammit. Forget everything the fucking monks said. This guy didn't look any older than Kouryuu himself.

Stop being such a baby, he told himself sternly. Breathing in just a little bit, he sifted his fingers through the think, unruly hair, searching for-aha! Kouryuu parted the heavy pelt so he could see better, peering intently.

It was a thin, thin circlet made out of some kind of metal, probably gold. Power limiter? Kouryuu's eyes narrowed. A sutra could do something like that. Curiouser and curiouser.

A long-fingered hand reached out. Kouryuu stilled, but the claws only brushed his hair gently, so gently. Kouryuu felt a shiver run down his spine.

"Anyone home in there?" he asked. Fuck, this was surreal.

The hand dropped away, but its owner took a step forward, raking Kouryuu's fingers through his knotty hair again and why were they still there, anyway? He pulled them back hastily and took a small step in retreat. Prudently. The beast advanced another pace and-

-fell on his ass.

Kouryuu looked down and noticed for the first time that he was dripping all over the stone floor. He couldn't help it. He started laughing. Snickering, Koumyou would have said, exactly the one that always landed him with the most unpleasant chores; but oh, was it worth it.

Hopefully the beast had a sense of humour.

"Morons. I can't keep calling you that." Unless he chewed with his mouth open. "What's your name?" Kouryuu asked, holding out his hand.

Gold looked up at him wordlessly, with what almost had to be a light of its own, but his hand, at least, was accepted. And then nearly torn from its socket. Damn youkai strength.

"You should wear shoes, idiot," Kouryuu told him. Then he realised they were inside. "Sandals. Whatever. Maybe I should just put on some dry clothes."

Kouryuu's mouth twisted wryly. If his current attire was any indication, his...host's wardrobe didn't include many shirts, and no way were any jeans going to fit. He was a little on the short side and even narrower in the hips than Kouryuu.

They kind of stared at each other for a while, while Kouryuu mentally kicked himself for being a slack-jawed half-wit; and then, with a look of great thoughtfulness, the beast walked past him. Kouryuu watched him go with a sense of relief. He was getting a little chilly; maybe of he looked around he could find-

The beast stopped and glanced back over his shoulder impatiently-Kouryuu's facial muscles twitched in sympathy-and Kouryuu took the hint. Follow. Right. Why the hell not?

There was no light in the hall they walked down. Apparently, the beast didn't need any. Kouryuu trailed his fingers along the wall and hoped for no sudden stops.

It wasn't a long walk; the door the beast led him to was only a short ways along the hallway. The room behind it had a window, about as helpful as the others. Another awkward, speaking silence.

"It's fine. Uh, thanks," Kouryuu said dismissively. Incongruously, he tried to smile.

The beast bared his fangs uneasily in reply and flowed out. Kouryuu stared at the fingers of the hand that had gripped the beast's. The look on his face was contemplative.

Miraculously, there were clothes in the room's armoire. Miraculously indeed. This must have been the room Koumyou had stayed in; there was a set of his spare robes hanging there. No. Just-no. But he was apparently the only thing in the entire castle producing heat, and he needed the change into something if he didn't really want to catch pneumonia and die.

Fuck that. He was getting out of this alive so he could punch Koumyou in the nose when he got back. So he rubbed himself dry with an extra blanket and pulled on the black underlayer. He drew the line at the full-on robes. The jeans were okay, although he had to use the sash to hold them up. The leather of the shirt and sleeves was still soft and supple.

"Magic furniture. Right."

"You bet your sweet ass," a voice said out of the armoire, though Kouryuu didn't see a face.

"Tell me the bed at least doesn't talk," Kouryuu said resignedly. He was getting a headache.

The armoire chuckled. "He doesn't say anything, but he watches. Kidding! Kidding! Sheesh, pretty-boy."

"I will shoot you." Kouryuu glared just in case it could see.

Kouryuu went out into the hall barefoot. The stone was glacial under his feet, but there had been no sandals and his boots were unpleasantly soaked and muddy. An apparently self-propelled mop scrubbing at his trail paused to bob at him reproachfully. Bemused, Kouryuu left the door ajar for it. Hopefully, it'd leave it that way and he could at least locate it by touch (by crashing into it) later.

Wandering around this mausoleum barefoot made Kouryuu feel small. He almost went back to his room and put his boots back on, squishing be damned.

Jaw clenched, Kouryuu pressed on. The storm was still lashing at the windows at the head of the stairs. After a moment's contemplation, Kouryuu turned away. Important rooms like the kitchen and the library were almost sure to be on the ground floor. Kouryuu hoped there was a kitchen; trail rations got old fast. The beast had to eat something, didn't he? And if the library had escaped shredding, it might provide a clue as to what the fuck was going on here.

Downstairs was black as sin. He'd found nothing useful in the front rooms, mostly wreckage and empty fireplaces. Beyond them lay a maze of intersecting corridors. Kouryuu walked with his hand on the wall slightly advanced so he wouldn't-

"Egg-sucking whoreson!"

-run into anything. Kouryuu rubbed his nose sourly.

"Ah-excuse me. Might I be of service?" another damned voice asked from somewhere to his right.

"I don't know," Kouryuu said acerbically, "Can you glow in the dark?"

Kouryuu turned, purely out of habit, towards the voice's source. At least it had some manners, Kouryuu thought, hand resting on his gun.

"Nothing simpler."

And abruptly there was light. Kouryuu blinked dazedly.

"I can in fact emit light irregardless of the ambient luminosity."

It was coming from a paper lamp sitting in an alcove in the wall.

"I don't suppose you know the way to the kitchen, too." Kouryuu ventured warily. His stomach was getting to be a distraction.

"But of course. If you would just..."

Kouryuu picked the lamp up by the handle.

"Ah. I'm afraid we're in the wrong wing. Turn left here..."

"Cheery place." Kouryuu looked around at the bare walls and thick, iron-bound doors. "You must not get many visitors."

"Only one that I recall. I believe it was raining then as well. Once might almost wish for it to rain more often." The lamp sighed.

All right then.

They crossed the entrance hall once again, passing behind the grand staircase this time. Kouryuu could see him clearly now as he leapt from one railing clear across to the other. He sailed overhead with a sinewy grace and landed in a sort of perpendicular crouch, hanging on to the banister with one hand and braced with both bare feet.

The beast's sharp eyes fixed clearly on Kouryuu before he launched again and, with a trajectory like a hairy ping-pong ball, bounced off the staircase to land gracefully on the floor. Kouryuu forced himself to remain calm.

"I'm getting dinner," Kouryuu said directly into those mad gold eyes.

Bracing himself, he took a step forward. The beast moved to block him, but no more. Kouryuu tried to step around him, with the same result. His eyes narrowed.

"What are you doing, you stupid monkey?" he snapped. The crazed fixation in his eyes when he looked at Kouryuu was creepy.

There was a flash of something else there when Kouryuu spoke. He looked away, noticing instead the lustre the monkey's skin took on in even this little bit of light. He'd be blinding in the sun.

Kouryuu brushed past him. Stupid monkey is right. It was his fault Kouryuu was here in the first place.

"What now?" Kouryuu asked his guide. "C'mon."

Kouryuu shook the lamp; he had the distinct impression it was glancing behind them at monkey-boy, who was skulking along in the most hyperactive imitation of stealth Kouryuu had ever witnessed.

"Oh. Ah. Turn right, then," The lamp directed.

Kouryuu looked around the pristine, if still rather gothic, kitchen. Some rough wooden cupboards turned out to conceal (Kouryuu was surprised at the vanity) a refrigerator, a microwave, and various other civilised conveniences. He opened the refrigerator, not expecting much. Certainly not expecting what looked like enough food to feed an army. Sushi, dumplings, noodles, rice-damn, he wasn't even going to have to cook anything.

While Kouryuu was sticking things in the microwave, monkey-brain stared at the refrigerator as though it had committed a personal betrayal. Yanking it open, he gazed avidly at the practically dripping slabs of meat the wood-covered door revealed.

Kouryuu pushed it shut and looked again, curious. Ah-rice. Just what he'd been looking for.

The monkey slammed it viciously and dragged out what seemed to be an entire side of beef.

Kouryuu stabbed emphatically at the microwave.

"Stupid monkey. What're you going to do with that?"

Sharp teeth ripped off a defiant chunk. Kouryuu sighed.

"At least I have something to call you."

The monkey alternated between trailing Kouryuu in an obsessively energetic fashion and disappearing completely. It was a peculiarly disorienting effect.

The utter lack of restraint made Kouryuu's brain hurt. He had watched the entire slab of raw meat disappear in less time than it took him to brew coffee, and the day after the storm let up, the monkey had reappeared bouncing and covered with mud. The mops, Kouryuu noticed, did not chide him.

Kouryuu spent his time exploring the vast, draughty pile of castle. The lamp was helpful more as light than as a guide. The only other person to have made use of it, Kouryuu suspected, had been his master; and he had evidently spent most of his time between his room, the kitchen, and a certain room in one of the towers.

Whatever was in there, the monkey didn't like it: whenever Kouryuu took them too close, he started growling and literally bouncing off the walls. The first time, Kouryuu reached for the door and woke up twenty yards down the corridor with a lump the size of fat Buddha on his head.

Today, Kouryuu was in the library. Barring the mysterious tower, which he couldn't seem to get near alone, it seemed like the most likely place to find something useful. It was large, and some of the bookcases were slightly toppled. A pre-verbal ape certainly hadn't collected all this. Not for the first time, Kouryuu wondered who had built this place.

Kouryuu was up early, which was a good way to shake his erstwhile stalker. Kouryuu didn't know where the monkey slept, but he evidently slept like a log. It was all but impossible to concentrate with him jittering around, and the library didn't need any more disrupting. Kouryuu's efforts to appear boring by plodding methodically around the fortress had been woefully unsuccessful. All Kouryuu was hoping for now was that one of the scrolls would reveal what the monkey was, and who had shut him in here and why, and what he, Kouryuu, was supposed to do about it.

It was about midmorning and Kouryuu was trudging through yet another thick text in rather antiquated and artistically calligraphed Chinese when the monkey bounded into the room and, with all the delicacy of a rip-tide, dragged Kouryuu out of the library and all the way to the outer grounds.

"Let me go, you stupid chimp! What the fuck-I'm-going-to-shoot-your-ass!"

Whacking the monkey repeatedly over the head with his paper fan was like whipping a boulder with a wet noodle. The casual strength was terrifying, if Kouryuu was allowiing himself to be terrified.

Once outside, the monkey dropped him on his ass and went cartwheeling across the lawn. The sun was almost blinding; Kouryuu realised he hadn't been outside in days.

The monkey tumbled back over to Kouryuu while he was still rubbing his bruised ass. Kouryuu glared at him.

"I have two words for you, monkey: impulse control."

The monkey wriggled closer, grinning madly. That should have been warning enough, but Kouryuu was still surprised when one clawed hand came to touch his hair. A look of intense concentration took over the glowing brown face.

"Goku." The voice was rough with disuse.

"What did you say?"

Sharp nails scraped lightly over his scalp.

"Goku," the monkey repeated.

"Goku," Kouryuu said.

The monkey smiled brilliantly and promptly leapt forty feet in the air and started harassing the defenceless trees.

Kouryuu buried his face in his hands.

"Aagh, stupid monkey."

On to Chapter Two.