Chapter Text
Sun Wukong had been back for a week now, and it wasn’t going well.
They hadn’t actually reconciled since their fight, or even really spoken: Guanyin had appeared with a bristling, fidgety Wukong in tow, and ordered Xuanzang to take him back. Xuanzang had bowed, Guanyin had departed, and master and disciple had spent the rest of the week eyeing each other with, Xuanzang glumly suspected, identical expressions of sullen anxiety.
It had been a relief to come across this city at the foot of the mountain pass, and disperse to beg alms and shelter for the night. Xuanzang wandered through the marketplace, exchanging bows and smiles and quiet greetings, and feeling the sore knot under his heart unclench a little each time a stranger, moved to charity, dropped money or vegetables into his bowl: See, there are good kind people in the world, see, it is not all monsters and violence and fear. This is why you are going West. You can make the world better for them.
It will all be worth it, he reminded himself again. Years of repetition had rendered the words almost meaningless, but he pressed them into himself again and again until it felt like pressing on a bruise. It’s worth it.
A short, thickset man of middle years came whistling up the street, bobbing his head at his neighbors as they dodged his oversized pack. He looked tired and dirty, apparently just returning to town, but his smile decided Xuanzang. He stepped forward to beg a donation.
And spotted the bundle of monkey skins dangling from his pack.
His first instinct was to flinch. But his second was to step into the man’s path and say, urgently, “Your pardon, honored sir. Would it be possible to ask you a few questions about your line of work?”
The hunter eyed Xuanzang’s begging bowl a little warily, as if suspecting a con. But he shrugged.
Xuanzang darted a look over his shoulder: Wukong was a good distance down the road, cheerfully terrifying a donation out of an elderly merchant. Well out of earshot, in this noisy city market. Xuanzang nevertheless lowered his voice as he asked, “I wonder if you could tell me anything about, er. Training monkeys?”
The man’s heavy brows knotted together as he said, “I can, actually—my grandfather was famous for it, though I’m more in the line of meat and skins, myself. But what’s a wandering monk doing with a pet monkey? Seems a good deal more trouble than it’d be worth, on the road.”
Xuanzang winced at both the truth of this assumption and the errors. “He…was a gift,” he said. “From a most esteemed benefactress.”
The hunter grinned a little behind his beard. “So you can’t get rid of him.”
“No.” Xuanzang winced again, in memory of Guanyin’s acid tongue. “She was, ah, very clear on that subject.”
The hunter made a wryly sympathetic sort of face, which—shouldn’t have felt as nice as it did, probably, but not even the horse had shown any inclination to take Xuanzang’s side since Wukong’s return last week.
Which was fair.
Xuanzang knew Wukong was waiting for an apology. (Xuanzang would’ve liked one, himself, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen, and anyway he knew that as Master it was his duty to be the more emotionally mature.) But an apology to Wukong would also necessitate an explanation—not just of having abused the fillet, but of Xuanzang's entirely irrational insistence on banishment.
And Xuanzang couldn’t explain it, not without—
He wasn’t going to explain.
“My wife’s rich aunt made her a dress,” said the hunter. “Ugliest damn thing you ever saw, makes her look like a pumpkin, but she wears it to every festival, to stay in the old lady’s good graces.”
“Something—a little similar, yes,” said Xuanzang, who did not think the two were similar at all.
“So what’s the issue?” asked the hunter. “He bite?”
Xuanzang blinked back a sudden vivid sense memory of being spattered with warm gore and looking up from his prayers to see Wukong perched on the back of a monster not five feet away, his oversized canines dripping red.
“…Occasionally,” he said, pleased when his voice stayed level.
It wasn’t that Xuanzang was afraid of his eldest disciple. Anymore. Guanyin’s fillet had helped a lot in the beginning—not even using it, just knowing it was there. And then Wukong’s own easy humor and clear dedication to keeping Xuanzang alive—if not exactly well—had filled in the rest.
Mostly.
…All right, occasionally Sun Wukong still spooked him half to death; there was nothing like getting up in the night to relieve oneself and having a dark hairy shape with fiery glowing eyes drop out of the trees practically on one’s head. Whatever Xuanzang had been after that—wheezing, humiliated, and damp were all fair descriptors—it hadn’t been relieved.
Anyway, it would be stupid not to be afraid of Wukong: Wukong could shatter mountains. He could reduce Xuanzang to pulp by poking him too hard.
He rubbed two fingers between his eyes. “The real problem is that he doesn’t listen,” he said. “He knows better, he has demonstrated that he does know when I don’t want him to do something, and then he’ll…”
“Look you in the face and do it anyway?” the man supplied, grimacing.
“Yes!” Half desperate, Xuanzang pressed his hands together. “Please, sir, any advice would be deeply welcome.”
“Sure, sure,” said the hunter, flattered into geniality. He hitched up his heavy pack. “So, you gotta understand,” he said, “it’s not like training a dog, and it’s not like training an apprentice—acolyte, I guess, in your case. Monkeys are too rebellious and smart for the one, and—” He paused, and grinned a little. “Well, actually, I know some pretty dumb apprentices, so. Nah, nah, turns out it’s almost exactly like working with a toddler.”
“I…haven’t had much experience there, either,” Xuanzang admitted. Upon reflection, he didn’t think he’d actually ever spoken to a toddler. He’d been the only child below the age of twelve in the monastery, and—aside from the brief eventful trip to reclaim his parents at eighteen—he’d never left the monastery until this trip. Which was long on demons and therefore understandably short on small fragile mortal children.
“Hm,” said the trapper. He considered a moment, and then said, “Ah, what the hell; you may as well have it. Follow me, sir monk.”
So Xuanzang followed the man down a few winding narrow streets, and then a few more. Around the time a worried little voice started making noise in the back of his head—mostly about how humiliating it would be to need a rescue from Wukong right now—the hunter stopped in front of a battered yellow door. “Hallo the house!” he yelled.
There was a terrible shriek, and Xuanzang had just time enough to resign himself to another kidnapping/ robbery/ assault when three or possibly eight small children came bursting out the door and flung themselves at the hunter, screaming, “Papa papa papapapa! YOU’RE BACK!” at the top of their small yet shockingly powerful lungs.
There followed an overwhelming amount of talking, all of which seemed to be occurring for its own sake, rather than to be understood or even acknowledged. Xuanzang smiled nervously, and hoped he would not be called upon to participate in the proceedings.
At length the man peeled one of his clinging offspring off of his shoulder, and instructed her to run inside and “fetch the book.”
Xuanzang snapped to attention. “A book?”
The man shrugged, dislodging another child. “It’s not doing me much good; I can’t read. I keep it around as a way to remember my old grandfather, who wrote it, and to look good to my neighbors—except all the neighbors know I can’t read, so it doesn’t work.” He grinned. “You may as well have it. I can vouch for the advice; my father taught me its contents well, even if he didn’t teach me reading.”
The child reappeared, respectfully holding… Well, it was a little like a book. Though not many books were written on five thin boards tied together with twine.
Xuanzang did not care at all that it was crude and grubby and obviously short. Because the title on the topmost board was On the Training of Monkeys.
“Hey there, Master,” said a voice from directly overhead. The Ruyi Jingu Bang slammed upright into the middle of the street, making all the houses shudder. An instant later Wukong dropped off the roof to perch, impossibly, on the staff’s tip, his forearms propped on his knees, his wrists dangling. “You wandered off,” he said, though the accusation was papered over with the sharp, brittle cheer that characterized all their interactions, lately. “Who’re these people, then?”
Xuanzang turned to give the trapper a panicked look, but the man had one already. “What the shit,” said he: a sadly typical reaction upon meeting Sun Wukong.
“Monkey,” said a small child, wide-eyed. And then parroted gleefully: "Shit!"
“Sun,” said Xuanzang, as evenly as he could, “I have just been begging alms. You can see I am in no danger.”
Wukong tipped his head a fraction, and his eyes flared gold as he scanned for demonic auras and found none. He grunted.
“Hi, monkey,” said the wide-eyed child.
Wukong blinked the ghostly golden flames from his eyes, and smirked. “Hey, kid.”
“Well,” Xuanzang said to the trapper with great and hearty awkwardness, “it was very pleasant to meet you, but I must rejoin my disciple now.”
The man gave Xuanzang a look of mingled incredulity and pity—that was kind of him—and then took him thoroughly aback by foregoing the parting bow and hugging him.
Xuanzang went rigid.
“Thank you so much for your blessings on my family,” the man said loudly, and Xuanzang felt a small wooden booklet shoved into the sash at the small of his back.
“May the heavens smile upon you,” Xuanzang told him with fervent sincerity, even as he cringed at the smudges the hug had left on his clothes.
Wukong snorted.
#
Xuanzang wasn’t stupid enough to think he could hide anything from his eldest disciple for long—if indeed Wukong wasn’t already on to him. He needed to get rid of the little book immediately.
So that night, in the cramped front room that had been lent to the four pilgrims, Xuanzang seated himself close to the fire and settled in to meditate. He didn’t often let himself spend more than an hour on it: the time was always more valuably spent on travel or sleep or chores. But he wanted to be sure Wukong would be asleep.
And when he opened his eyes four hours later, he felt better than he had in months. Which wasn’t saying much, but—maybe he could still take it as a sign. Maybe everything else would also start to improve, soon.
He darted a glance at Wukong, curled up into a deceptively tiny ball on his bedroll and grimacing as he dreamed, little quick flashes of teeth.
Xuanzang slid the trapper’s book soundlessly from his sash. He stared hard at each page for a few seconds, his head buzzing with the effort of focus, before tearing it free and feeding it to the fire. He waited for the last page to crumble to ash, and then moved silently to his bedroll.
“You’re gonna be cranky in the morning, on that little sleep,” Wukong told him.
Xuanzang jumped, barked his shin painfully against the table, and sat down hard on the floor, clutching it and glaring at Wukong.
“Getting a head start on the cranky, I see,” Wukong observed.
“Good night, Sun Wukong.”
His disciple waited until Xuanzang was lying down to say, very neutrally:
“You didn’t read it.”
“I didn’t need to,” said Xuanzang, just as neutral.
Wukong made a little hissing noise, of confusion or frustration, and said nothing further.
Xuanzang lay awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to Friar Sand’s soft snores and Bajie’s noisy ones. Wukong twitched restlessly for a while, and subsided.
The minutes crawled past. Then Xuanzang sat up in bed, the memorized characters still floating in his vision, and said aloud, “Wait, what?”