Chapter Text
The first few weeks after the mountain, Wukong slept like a dead thing every single night.
It was a bit counterintuitive, honestly: he’d been holding still for five hundred years, you’d think anything remotely like stillness would have him all but clawing his own fur off. Certainly during the day he jittered and bounced enough that his new Master began to look a bit cross-eyed. But, well, he hadn’t eaten in five hundred years, and pain took it out of a guy: he maybe wasn’t at his best. He tired easily.
And Heaven and Earth, the glorious comfort of being able to curl up, on his side, with a blanket—yeah, Wukong tended to pass out within seconds.
And as the weeks passed, he put on some decent weight, and the little fractures running through his bones from five centuries of pressure healed up neat as you please, and the nasty bald patches where the stone had rubbed away his fur filled back in. Wukong snuggled gleefully into his bedroll every night, and slid off to sleep basking in the bliss of well-being.
***
So yeah, that didn’t last.
***
Wukong’s excuse, later, would be that it had been surprisingly cold that night, and his Master was right there, and he smelled—comforting or whatever, and he’d just looked really soft, okay, and shut up.
It had just—it had been a long time since he’d slept properly, all stuffed up against other warm breathing bodies. He’d been enjoying the basics of not-sleeping-under-a-mountain so much that he hadn’t thought to miss companions, in the same way he didn’t miss fresh fruit for a few weeks because he was so delighted just to have food. But monkeys weren’t meant to live on travel biscuits, and they also weren’t meant to sleep all by themselves, not when there was someone warm and soft and supposedly friendly sleeping two feet away.
Humans did it differently. That was made extremely clear.
Tripitaka had looked so appalled, you’d think he’d been stabbed instead of cuddled. Wukong nursed the hurt of that, sullenly, and—okay, maybe he let it inform his actions, a little, when they ran into those six bandits the next morning.
Of course then came the fucking circlet, and you’d better believe that cured any desire for snuggles. Wukong took to sleeping in trees, or at least on the opposite side of the fire, in case his sleeping self tried for a traitorous roll-and-reach.
***
Then they got Pigsy. Pigsy made it clear from the outset that he blamed Wukong for dragging him out of his nice comfortable life, and though he’d never dare attempt another outright fight, he was willing to sabotage his new “Elder Brother” by every other means available. Wukong might be immortal six ways from tomorrow, but that didn’t mean he felt safe literally sleeping with the enemy.
Anyway he had his pride. He wasn’t gonna risk another reaction like Tripitaka’s. Not from Pigsy.
***
Sandy didn’t even give Wukong the chance to consider it: the very first night, he took his bedroll and hiked as far from the campsite as he could get and still be within a reasonable distance for emergencies. And yeah, Wukong could understand a solitary guy like the river ogre needing a little space, but it was honestly a little insulting, the effort he put into avoiding them every night.
Wukong did try sleeping on the dragon-horse once or twice, and got bitten for it. It didn’t hurt—actually he worried about Ao Lie’s teeth—but it…kinda hurt.
This whole bunch of idiots had issues, honestly.
Wukong maybe went to ask Guanyin for help more often than he strictly needed to, over the next few years. But every time she saw him, she immediately put her hand on his head, pushed her fingers into his fur, made little stroking motions. Like she wanted to.
The wanting to touch him was even nicer than the actual touching.
He started wadding his blankets up around him in a nest every night. The feeling of being surrounded…helped. And if he curled up small enough, he could wrap his arms all the way around his legs, and grip his tail with both feet, and it was sort of like being held.
He was fine. He’d managed for five centuries. Hells, he’d managed even before that—the first coupla years out of his egg, the Huaguoshan monkeys were all super wary of him. Chased him off with sticks and rotten fruit and screeching every time he got too close. And that had—had not been great, but he’d learned how to survive on his own, he’d gotten stronger and faster and braver than all of them, and so he’d deserved it when they made him King. None of them had had the guts to jump into a waterfall.
Or the desperation.
Nah, guts sounded better.
And after that, he took care of them, he made himself essential, so they’d never have cause to chase him off again.
He could do that here, with this new little troop.
Ugh, but it was slow going. No matter how many times he proved himself, over six years of adventures, Tripitaka still wouldn’t touch him voluntarily. He’d thank him, all soft and sincere, or he’d give Wukong one of his rare gentle smiles, and Wukong would start to hope—but then nothing came of it. Not so much as a head pat, never mind real, actual contact, with warm breathing skin and a heartbeat underneath and arms around his shoulders and hands in his fur.
Wukong tried real hard to remember that humans were different from monkeys. They were just naturally more reserved and standoffish. And monks were even more reserved than regular humans. So—it wasn’t, y’know, hopeless or anything. His Master didn’t actually hate him.
He didn’t.
And he wouldn’t chase Wukong off, like the monkeys had, or Master Subodhi, or the Celestials. First off, Tripitaka was good, like genuinely a good person: he had compassion on everything from demons down to stray dogs. Wukong had caught him giving their travel rations to a truly pathetic specimen in one backwater village, and he’d had to haul the monk off and bully him into washing up before he got mange from petting the thing. Wukong did not want mange in his troop, thank you.
Second, Wukong wasn’t just too useful to chase off, he was straight-up vital. Sandy and Pigsy were decent fighters, but they weren’t in his league—not even close. Tripitaka wouldn’t last ten minutes out here without the Monkey King, and he knew it.
So even if Master did hate him—which he didn’t!—he would never make a move that suicidally stupid. Wukong was safe. He could relax. Maybe let his guard down, start getting more friendly with his junior disciples. Sandy was a sweetheart, under all his accidentally-creepy vibes, and even Pigsy could be a lot of fun. They’d goof around and roughhouse, and Wukong allowed himself to be ruffled and roughed up by warm calloused oversized hands in the name of brotherly bonding.
It was good.
Yeah. He was safe in this little troop. He could…belong, or whatever.
***
…Haha. Ha.
***
It was well past midnight, and Wukong had gotten maybe twenty minutes of sleep so far. A few sullen embers still glowed in their campfire. Pigsy was snoring away like an entire platoon of trumpeters had come down with head colds. Sandy had disappeared as usual, and Tripitaka was completely silent in the way that meant he wasn’t sleeping either.
Wukong pulled his arms even tighter around himself, and his tail, too. He stared at the campfire, and debated getting up and poking it back to life. His instincts usually calmed down a bit if he was warm enough.
Ah, who was he kidding, it wasn’t gonna be enough.
He’d been back with his troop for a little over a week, and it wasn’t going well. Guanyin had told Master straight out that he wasn’t allowed to kick Wukong out again, so you’d think he’d actually finally feel safe: Master wouldn’t disobey a direct order from a bodhisattva any more than he’d cut off his own hands.
Ha, except Wukong had been confident he belonged here before, and that had ended with him bleeding from the eyeballs and I never want to lay eyes on you again, Sun Wukong.
And, yes, he’d screwed up with that bandit kid—okay, he’d screwed up really really bad—but c’mon, Wukong screwed up all the time, Tripitaka knew this, he’d known this for years, why had this one screwup suddenly merited banishment?
…Yeaahh, that argument was not actually holding a lot of water, even for Wukong, but realizing that only made him more resentful.
He flipped over and pushed his head and shoulder hard against the ground, like it was miraculously going to suddenly grow warm and press back.
Tripitaka sighed, almost noiselessly.
Right. And there was that.
Whatever had been wrong with the guy before, freaking out and banishing Wukong hadn’t gotten it out of his system at all. He was still…“grey” was the only word Wukong could think of.
The monk had always been the quiet sort, but more and more days went by where he didn’t say anything. Or look at anything. Including Wukong. No more of those soft sincere smiles or snooty scholarly jokes no one understood, no more of that ridiculous eye-squinching thing he did when he thought Wukong was funny but ought not to be encouraged. No more Master. Instead they had this sort of bleak grey ghost haunting the pilgrimage. He didn’t eat, he slacked off on chores, he only rarely roused himself for evening lessons. A few months back, he’d even stopped freaking out during kidnappings or attacks. Now he just put up with them, blankly. Like a puppet with no hand to control it.
Wukong was pretty sure that was something he should be seriously concerned about.
Except he was also pissed as hell, and so he didn’t feel particularly motivated in the fixing-shit direction. Tripitaka could pull his own head out of his very own ass. Wukong had given this stupid monk everything he had, for six years, and he’d still banished him. Against his own self-interest, even.
Was Wukong seriously that hard to have around? Like, worse than a mangy dog?
He rolled abruptly to his feet and stalked off into the darkness, ignoring Tripitaka’s tentative call after him. He wasn’t gonna sleep anyway, and it was easier—or, okay, not easier, but simpler—when he didn’t have the option of company, however false. He was wound up and miserable and he just knew sometime soon his pride would finally dip low enough and he’d wind up clinging to someone. And probably crying, knowing him. He cried way too easily when he was tired or drunk or… or just…
Yeah, better to remove temptation.
And he could see it as practice. This is what it would be like, to be banished for good. Not so hard, right? After all, he was the Handsome Monkey King, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, the terror of, ha, pretty much everyone. So he could totally handle being on his own.
He was fine.
He spent four hours up a nice comfy tree, utterly failing to achieve anything above a restless doze, and finally gave up and went looking something to fight: nothing wore you out faster than a good fight.
Except it wasn’t a good fight. Wukong wound up sorta toying with the lizard demon, trying to provoke it into anything like a challenge, but it only had two and half decent moves, which it just used over and over, in increasing terror, until even Wukong began to feel like a bully. And still he drew the fight out, almost frantic with frustration.
Finally he hit it a little too hard. It gushed some awful acidic slime all over him in its death throes: the most effective attack yet.
Wukong stormed out of its lair, kicking moldering old skulls and leathery lizard-eggs out of his path, and literally steaming. Somehow he felt both more exhausted than ever and also way too worked up to sleep. And his shirt was all gross and full of smoking holes. Master was gonna give one of his signature Sighs over that.
If he pulled himself out of wherever he’d gone long enough to notice.
Wukong discovered that he didn’t want to test it. He’d thought not getting touched was bad, but wow, turned out it had nothing on being overlooked.
He stuffed the ruined shirt under a rock, shook himself violently until the worst of the gunk was gone, and curled up in the same comfy tree with his arms wrapped all the way around himself, so tightly that his shoulders started to ache.
…He could go back to Mount Huaguo.
He’d have fresh fruit for every meal. He’d have silk robes and a purple-gold crown and a bed of soft grass with a dozen of his little monkeys atop and around him, warm and trusting. It would be so easy to pick up where he’d left off—a powerful yaoguai warlord, partying and fighting and acting like the last five hundred—and six—years hadn’t happened.
Except he couldn’t. He’d let down all his little monkeys spectacularly, his sworn battle-brothers hated him, and every single god or bodhisattva who gave him a pass these days would very abruptly stop doing that, if he abandoned this quest.
And…and anyway even just thinking about it, he kept seeing his Master look at him, all sad and disappointed at his choice.
Wukong wanted to pull all his fur out in sheer frustration. He’d changed too much on this stupid pilgrimage, meeting all the little people who got hurt when the yaoguai partied and fought. He wasn’t what he had been, anymore.
But he still wasn’t…whatever he was turning into, yet. He wasn’t good, he knew. The lessons Tripitaka preached made sense, he liked the concepts, but sometimes all those morals felt like way too much work, when you could just turn your problem into meat paste, instead.
He didn’t fit anywhere, with anyone.
Except here.
He ground his teeth until the harsh stone-on-stone noise spooked all the local wildlife into silence, and went back to camp to fetch his spare shirt out of the luggage.
He was gonna make this work, dammit. Even if it meant he was miserable and sleep-deprived all the way to India. He’d put up with worse, the Heavens knew.
He was fine. He’d be fine.
***
Tripitaka was still awake, even though it was almost dawn. Just lying there, staring blankly at the stars.