taare tuttaare ture svaahaa
"Om ture tuttaare taare... ow."
Sanzo glanced up, eyebrow raised. "Too tight?"
"No. No, it's fine." Goku said it a little too quickly, though, and Sanzo let the chain slacken by maybe an inch out of reflex. He could tell the chains were making Goku tense, which wasn't going to give this much more of a chance of working.
"Keep chanting," he said instead, looping the chain under Goku's ankles again. "Focus on your breathing. And you 'taare'd when you should have 'ture'd."
Goku grumbled, and his shoulders twitched as though he were getting ready for a disgruntled wriggle; Sanzo rapped him on the back of his head, and he yelped and settled again. "I don't think I'm any good at meditating."
"Try." He clamped the chains shut, tested them for give, and got to his feet, walking around in front of Goku. Out of arm's reach, he did not think. The chains were supposed to take care of that, anyway. Goku hated to be chained -- he could tell by the tension in the line of Goku's shoulders, the way he'd scowled when Sanzo started to wrap them -- but hadn't complained. Sanzo supposed he preferred it to the alternative.
The room looked very empty; the table and chairs, which constituted most of its furnishings, had been cleared out for this experiment, and he stood where the table normally did. Just the narrow cot, the few shelves, the young man chained and on his knees and the priest standing in front of him. Goku had been uncomfortable with using this room; there were too many doors, too many potential avenues for escape. After a while, though, he'd been forced to admit that the rest of the monastery was even worse. At least here there were doors and not screens, and they were relatively secluded from the main exits. It had been carefully prepared, as well: heavy casements pushed in front of both doors on their other sides, a few guards posted -- not that Sanzo expected them to be of much help if the worst happened, but it relaxed Goku somewhat, and that was most important. The point was, after all, to keep the worst from happening in the first place.
"Om taare," Goku began again, and then stopped, and gave Sanzo a plaintive look. "Are they tight enough? They don't feel very tight."
"If you don't want to do this, say so," Sanzo told him. Goku bit his lip, and looked down.
"I..." He sighed. "...No. No, I better do it."
"All right. Then focus. Release the stray thoughts as they come."
Goku nodded, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. "Om taare tuttare ture svaahaa..." Minutes passed, and the words wove into a low drone, as he'd been taught. Sanzo found his lips twitching a little. It sounded odd, to say the least, coming from the monkey. Still, hopefully not odd enough that it wouldn't be effective. Another precaution they'd set up, much longer in advance than the others: they'd been practicing mantra meditation for months, ever since he'd first suggested this to Goku. He'd heard monks speak of mantra as a "mind protector," and if there were any situation where such a thing would be useful...
"Om taare tuttare..."
It would be better not to give him any warning, Sanzo decided. Just let him absorb himself in the meditation, and then remove it. Perhaps Goku would never even notice the change. He'd be stuffing himself with bean rolls to celebrate in another ten minutes.
If Sanzo's palms were sweating, he chose not to notice it.
"...taare tuttare ture..."
There was a crease in Goku's forehead, where his brows had knitted together with the force of his focus. It was just above it where Sanzo's palm pressed to metal, and in one motion tugged the crown up and off.
Goku was afraid of the power that his body could contain; that was the heart of the issue. He couldn't allow fear to control him, and nor was it sensible for him to rely on just the crown as a defense. If he could learn to control that other side himself, Sanzo had reasoned, then the fear would leave him.
And Goku had seemed convinced. It had all sounded very convincing at the time.
"Om... taare..." The crease in Goku's brow deepened; there was a sheen of sweat beading along it now. "T... taare tutt, t... tu...uuu... San..." The words trailed off into a long groan of effort, and then what sounded like pain. And there was hair brushing Goku's shoulders where there hadn't been before.
It was instinct more than anything else that made him move to replace the crown; if the experiment had failed, then it had failed, and safety was most important. Then Goku's head thrashed at just the wrong moment -- whether by accident or out of someone else's malice Sanzo would never know -- and knocked his wrist, sending the crown tumbling from Sanzo's hand. He dove for it, and with his head down it took a moment for the high tortured sound he heard to register: creaking chain.
He looked up just in time to hear the thick crack sounds as the links gave way, and to take half a coil of broken chain in the side of the head.
There are moments when the world seems to clarify all at once; when objects stand out in bright two-dimensional relief, and even events that occur very quickly seem to leave plenty of time for one to think incredibly inane things in between them. Before he hit the ground, and lost his grip on the crown again and felt it roll away a few inches from his fingers, Sanzo thought very clearly: Of course the chain wasn't enough. Goku's grown up now; so is he.
Living weight crashed down on the small of his back as soon as he landed, pinning him to the floor. Something cold brushed down past his face, and then cinched tight around the front of his neck, digging angles into his skin -- the broken length of chain. Son Goku was using it as a garrote. The chain pulled back and dragged him, choking, up from the floor, and he dug at it with his fingers, trying to lessen the pressure on his windpipe. With one hand. The other, stalwart in its determination, kept stretching across the floor, trying to reach the crown. Until, that was, a hand clamped around its wrist and dragged it back; claws dug into his skin.
Son Goku's weight shifted, and the chain jerked Sanzo by his neck around onto his back. Huge black-purple flowers were just starting to threaten across his vision when the chain, without warning, pulled away; it wrapped around his wrists instead, binding them together on his chest. Son Goku sat back on Sanzo's chest, and Sanzo's vision cleared enough to get his first good look at his captor. He was smirking, slit-pupilled golden eyes narrowed, pulling back on the chain with both his hands. Caught without a better response, Sanzo jerked the hand nearest the crown into the cold bite of the chain, trying to take him by surprise, and Son Goku pulled back with a scowl of censure. Ah. Apparently somewhere in the god-creature's animal mind a triangle had been connected, between Sanzo's hands and the gold crown and his own head, the sum of whose angles was the end of his enjoyment. He wasn't taking any chances.
In stark, bright, hellish clarity, Sanzo thought, As an impasse it won't last. He still has teeth.
In fact, when Son Goku leaned forward and down over him, that was what Sanzo first thought he was doing; he gritted his teeth and braced for a bite. Warm breath touched the side of his neck, but for the moment, no teeth. Deep inhales, almost snuffling sounds.
Son Goku was smelling him, Sanzo realized. Breathing in his scent.
There was no good reason, given the situation, the danger, the links of chain biting into his wrists, why that should be arousing.
Still, he seemed distracted, and distraction was something Sanzo would need to encourage, if he were to have any hope of getting out of this. Over the spill of Son Goku's hair, he could see the crown shining on the floor, just out of immediate reach. It looked like a picnic set up on a riverbank might, to someone being pulled beneath the current. Sanzo stared at it, and though later he would convince himself that he'd had no time to think about any of it, of course there seemed to be plenty of time right then, enough to review all the angles, recognize the immediacy of the danger, and to realize that his own safety was not a priority -- that keeping Son Goku inside this room was more important than getting himself out. Plenty of time to consider the word "distraction," break it down into component syllables in his mind until it ceased to mean anything at all.
He rolled his body up into Son Goku's, arching his back as though stretching it; it was an awkward, clunky motion, and didn't accomplish much, except to make Son Goku interpret it as a struggle. He pulled back and jerked up on his makeshift reins, grinding Sanzo's wrists together, scowling his suspicion. Hoping to preempt any more serious punishment, Sanzo tried again, and did a little better this time: he pressed the flat of his forearm up against his captor's groin, at least, rubbing there with some difficulty. Somehow it was not surprising to find faint evidence of hardness, under the jeans Goku had been wearing. Goku was grown up now...
The dark amusement had gone out of Son Goku's expression now, leaving behind mistrust, surprise, and what Sanzo could only hope was the first spark of interest. He cocked his head on an angle that Sanzo found inexplicably disturbing -- fluid, boneless, like an owl's head -- and deliberately let the chain slacken, if only by a few inches. And Sanzo took the subtlest deep breath he could, and used the new freedom to press his hand forward, in place of his arm. Son Goku's eyes slitted half-shut, and he rocked forward into the touch.
Distraction. Like any predator, only interested in pain and pleasure. The Buddha would not approve, Sanzo thought, and bit down on an insane urge to laugh.
Son Goku squirmed his hips back out of Sanzo's reach abruptly, grinding them against Sanzo's body instead; he choked up his grip on the chain and jerked Sanzo up by his wrists, pulling him up to a sitting position and settling with knees around Sanzo's hips. Sanzo ground up against him, trying for a steady rhythm -- who knew how long Son Goku's attention span was? It seemed Sanzo still had his interest for the time being, though; he leaned in and ran his tongue up the sweat-damp line of Sanzo's neck, and then across his lips, the heat of his breath soft and close. Again, it seemed as much predatory as sexual. Sanzo had the sense of being claimed in advance, of sweat and saliva sampled to whet an appetite for blood. That definitely shouldn't be arousing, either. He made a mental note of that.
Did some sort of sense memory carry over from Goku? Was his smell, his taste, familiar in some way that Son Goku couldn't quite put his clawed finger on, but that affected him all the same? So much time to think, to wonder, even with a monster straddling his lap and riding the crests of his hips, his breath quickening and taking on voice as it brushed past Sanzo's cheek. So slow, slow like each breath that resonated a mantra in the chest. There was all the time in the world.
A hand pressed to Sanzo's chest, and the gesture jolted him for a moment, it was so like Goku -- The claws, though, were definitely not. They ripped through the front of Sanzo's robe much more efficiently than Goku had ever dealt with the garment, for that matter, and with a lot less care for the skin underneath it; Sanzo hissed inadvertantly, as a few lines of pain sizzled down his belly. Son Goku shredded the last of the fabric before noticing the blood he had drawn, and a slow, dry smile spread across his face. He let Sanzo fall back to the floor and prowled down over him, bending to lick the beads of blood from the thin, shallow cuts along the sides of Sanzo's stomach. Sensations bled together -- the hot, wet tongue, the pain, the proximity to what was a much more insistent erection than he'd care to admit -- all jerked a rough, sharp groan out of Sanzo, his hips bucking this time without any planning on his part. He turned his head away, hair straggling out sweat-damp on the floor.
The fragments of his robe were ripped away from his body, the tangles of chain pulling his arms above his head to let it go. The realization of what Son Goku was preparing to do came over him all at once, in a cold nauseous wave. At this point, there was no question of stopping him. Self-defense was the only option.
Sanzo strained against the chain again; Son Goku pulled back at first, and then noticed he was reaching away from the crown, and apparently ceased to care. Sanzo fumbled blindly behind him, along the shelves, the chain digging into his wrists, and finally managed to slam his hand into the small glass vial he was looking for, half-hidden behind a few stacked books. The whole business went tumbling to the floor, where the books tumbled open on their spines, and the vial broke, bleeding its pale translucent contents into a puddle on the floor, just barely within reach. Good. Very good. He shoved his fingers into the mess, cutting himself on the edges of broken glass, and pulled his hands back down. Son Goku let him, and watched with narrowed eyes and avid interest as Sanzo worked his jeans open and wrapped the slickened hand around Goku's -- Son Goku's -- cock. The first few strokes won him not only a low, purring growl, but the freedom to go back for more. Better than he'd had any right to expect, really.
Strange, long moments: himself on his back, stroking hand dragging the one that was chained to it along as it slicked down Son Goku's cock, Son Goku perched on Sanzo's thighs, tilting his head back and panting. The silence in the room seemed to have a life of its own, the sound of their breathing only making it more pronounced by contrast. It was impossible to know what his captor thought of all this, except by his implicit permission; those alien gold eyes had the flat, glassy blankness of an animal's gaze. He was as difficult to read as Goku was easy. Maybe he didn't think anything at all.
Then Son Goku was pulling Sanzo's hands up over his head again, and wrestling Sanzo back onto his stomach, and he held the chain with one hand and shifted his weight, and Sanzo gritted his teeth and tried to relax his muscles and didn't quite make it in time to prepare for the cock that shoved inside him, grinding in deep, forcing all the air out of him in a thin choking hiss.
Heat was first, then motion. Slow to start, but hard, hard enough that it felt like it would split him apart. He bit his tongue and rode it out. The floor was cool against his cheek; it squeaked, faintly, under his skin. He could hear Son Goku's breathing over that, fast and labored. Enjoying himself, Sanzo halfway thought, and then his eyes winced shut as his hips were shoved down hard into the floor. He was going to have bruises, if he survived.
Broken glass aside, Sanzo found himself distantly but deeply grateful for the chance to prepare for this. Even as it was there was pain, an unaccustomed burn of friction inside him, hard heat battering tender skin as it pulled back and plunged in again, harder, then harder again. Son Goku was rough in ways that he would hardly have imagined Goku's body capable of, plunging, plundering with the abandon of a rutting animal. ...No; not even an animal, which wouldn't be so pleased with what pain it could cause. He could hear the broad smile that shaped Son Goku's breathing. Still, as his hips were ground down into the floor and his hands pulled up over his head, grunting with effort and pain, the idea wouldn't leave him: of being not fucked but mounted, used, of interest only as prey, one way or the other. A piece of furniture, except that furniture wouldn't bleed.
The floor was bare, and its sticking friction under his cock was almost unbearable.
Son Goku let out a low growl, and clamped a hand around Sanzo's side, just above his hip. A few minutes later the other one, which had been letting the chain slacken in his distraction, forgot it entirely, and seized Sanzo's other side, holding him to slam into him even deeper. Sanzo spread his knees and braced them, swearing under his breath, digging his fingers into the floor, his cock ground under him with every pounding stroke. Claws sliced thin lines into his sides, brief hot sizzles of pain and then cool beading blood, and he groaned out loud. Half expecting the smell of him bleeding to distract Son Goku's attention again; half expecting at any second the claws would move across his stomach and rip it wide open in a single efficient stroke, spilling guts and blood steaming across the floor. He imagined Son Goku's hands reaching up suddenly, raking claws across his throat and opening his jugular, or just closing around his neck and strangling him, digging his fingers in until his claws left welts, strangling him and fucking him and fucking him into the floor while his vision faded and lines of fire burned down into his lungs...
A thin ragged cry jerked out of him as he came in a hot white emptying rush, writhing and grinding his hips down into the floor at desperate speed.
There was a grunting shout in answer from Son Goku, and the cock inside him drove in even harder as he came, dragging the orgasm to an unbelievable crest that felt, for the endless seconds it lasted, like it would split his head in two. And then it was waning, and then finally it was over; the bruising pressure inside him softened and eased, and Son Goku collapsed halfway across him, in an apparent daze. Sanzo stretched his hands and brought them back down to a more comfortable position, and slowly rolled over as much as he could. With a hiss and wince: he hurt. Son Goku lay on his side, his legs across Sanzo's, his slit-pupilled eyes half-lidded. He met Sanzo's gaze with the confused, drowsy look of a tranquilized tiger.
And that was when Sanzo's hand, the one that had closed around the crown behind him, pistoned over and shoved it back onto Son Goku's head.
Son Goku's eyes went wide, but there wasn't even enough time for him to struggle; he yelped and then it became a scream, and he thrashed, and then fell limp as the change overtook him again. The last look Sanzo saw in his strange eyes was a mix of confounded surprise, and -- impotent anger? Indignance? Betrayal? But then their pupils were round again, and then they fell shut, and whatever it had been, it was gone now.
Jeans open, hair a mess, crown shoved down almost to his eyes, Goku slept peacefully on the floor beside him.
All the strength seemed to go out of Sanzo very suddenly, and he thumped down onto his back. He lay very still, staring at the ceiling. Breathing. Sticky, wet, empty, tacky blood drying on half a dozen thin cuts on his torso. He did not look at Goku.
I am going to kill you, he thought. I'm going to kill you, and then all of my troubles will be over. I'll get a pillow off the bed and shove it over your face while you're asleep. Sweat ran down his temple toward his hair, and he rubbed it away with the back of his hand. I'll strangle you with my bare hands. I'll go into the other room and get my gun, and I'll shoot you. Until I'm out of bullets.
Goku had fallen with his head on Sanzo's arm, and Sanzo raised his hand to comb his fingers through the young man's hair. It really was a terrible mess.
After a few minutes, Sanzo closed his eyes. It was going to be impossible to hide all the bruises on his wrists, he realized; the monks might ask about them. He was still trying to think of an explanation when he fell asleep.