voidtreckerexpress | A New Platform [Intro Post December]

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A New Platform [Intro Post December]

On the Train

It's only been a couple of days since the Voidtrecker Express took to the void once more, and many of the passengers are still recovering and recuperating after a very hectic end to their latest mission. Nevertheless, they are awoken by a familiar message.

"Good morning passengers, it is day sixteen of the month of Imagination. Points have been updated on the system."

They have indeed, and everyone can spend the morning shopping. Those who have been on the train for a while will be expecting the second announcement that comes a few hours later.

"Shortly arriving into a designated void platform. Exit from void in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one." A lurch and a jolt and the windows fill with the fog that means they are at a platform. It is warm outside with a pleasant breeze that flows down the platform, rustling the light spread of leaves that litter the floor.

As usual the first to leave the train notice nothing, walking silently, rucksacks on their backs, towards the barriers. Akemi Homura, Alfred the Poisoner, Donatello Versus, Chie Satonaka, Joscelin Fitzthomas, Ronan Lynch, Rose Tyler, Tangle the Lemur, Trowa Barton, Wester Mazaki and Whisper the Wolf all pass through the platform, not looking back before they disappear through the barriers and into the fog beyond.

But on the platform itself there are new faces. Wearing hoodies in all four colours, in various states of confusion.

For New Passengers

At first all they can see is steam, billowing around them as they come to their senses. The second thing they will notice is the swirling leaves at their feet, moving in flurries and rattling against each other softly. As their eyes adjust, they will see they are on a platform, cement and packed earth forming a very practical, plain-looking shelter. Behind them is a set of barriers, and in front of them is a single track extending both ways into thick fog.

They are standing, in clothes that are not their own and a style they might not even recognise. They are carrying a rucksack on their back. For a moment it seems to just be them, alone in the white haze but then the steam begins to fade and they realise they aren’t alone.

The platform is not large and it holds eight figures all facing the tracks, all dressed in cargo trousers and hoodies. Both left and right the tracks disappear into the mist. Then there is a roaring sound and out of the fog arrives a train. Jet black with gold writing on the side. The Voidtrecker Express. There is a hiss as the doors slide open and out into the gloom step a selection of people. Some are human, some are less so. Most are wearing the same hoodie in one of the four colours, red, orange, blue and purple though some are sporting different clothes in a variety of styles.

The Train

The doors hiss open. Those from the train may encourage those on the platform to board. It’s not like there's anywhere else to go and even if there was, you feel a pull. A need to board, a feeling that staying on the platform would lead to something terrible. If that is not enough, there are plenty of people on the platform now, to encourage them onto the train.

Each ICP shows the same message and next to the screens there are stacks of leaflets written by those on the train, with further information (see
'Publications'). The store rooms have been restocked with more jars of honey, the ingredient of the month of Imagination, as well as sundries.

A new carriage has been added right next to the luggage carriage. It is a second medical carriage, or triage carriage. Downstairs is more open with beds and chairs, upstairs are two surgical bays for those that need immediate attention.

For those intrigued by the claim of a parcel for every passenger they will find several large boxes filled with small blue bags. Inside each bag is ten dark blue coins imprinted on each side with a silver snowflake. Each bag has a small label with a passengers name. On the other side of the label it reads: Keep these safe for now.

Of course for any passengers that have bought items, these are also scattered around the luggage carriage as well.

New passengers will find their tickets allow them into their cabins. They may need to negotiate for beds, especially if they want a top bunk!

Room is tight but there are storage cubbies at the head of each bed, beds fold up and the bottom bunks double as benches for the small table. There is storage under those benches and you will hopefully find a pillow for your bed if it has not been nabbed by a roommate, there are also spare blankets for if it gets cold.

Departure

A second horn sounds to encourage any stragglers taking advantage of the pleasant weather and the doors slide shut. Veteran passengers know what will happen next, but they may wish to brief their new companions.

The train sets off, the fog obscuring the view again as it picks up speed.

"Welcome aboard, passengers of the Voidtrecker Express." A female-coded artificial sounding voice echoes throughout the train. "Please take the time to read the passenger information displayed on the Information and Communication points and familiarise yourself with the layout and emergency exits."

The train begins to tilt, leaving the ground and rising up into the fog-filled sky.

"Entrance into Voidspace imminent. New passengers are advised to remain seated. Entry into Voidspace in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one."

A shudder, a jolt, a lurch to the left. A flash of light, colourful and blinding. As quick as it happens it is done. The train seems to steady. The fog from the windows is gone now, replaced with a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colours.

Welcome to the Void!

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"...I mean..." Koumyou hesitates, then sighs softly.

"Not really? But it's not fair to you, if I brush everything off and pretend nothing's wrong inside."

He's seen Devero so upset he couldn't speak.

It seems cruel to just brush off his attempt to help, like Koumyou's so much better or something.

"And I guess you should know what you're getting so attached to," he adds quietly, "before it's too late."

Devero slides his hands into his pockets and steps back again, giving the other man some space. There is a voice in his head urging him stridently to back off-- it's not his place to ask, he's pushing his luck, how long will it be before Koumyou loses his patience and finds a way to shut Devero up--

After all, Madame doesn't often tolerate Devero's attempts to get her to talk to him anymore. She much prefers his mouth to be occupied elsewise.

But Koumyou isn't his Madame. He has to remember that. So though he wavers here, he doesn't break.

"Of course you don't want to talk about something painful," he says, quiet acknowledgement of asking a question with such an obvious answer. "Who does?"

That last, quiet comment makes him look up, his brows drawing. "Afraid you're going to scare me off, Sanzo?"

That last question gets a wobbly little smile from the priest, "...Perhaps a little?"

And then Koumyou goes to sit down on the side of the exam room's little bed again, running his uninjured hand up and over his head as he does so, his short nails scratching over his scalp through his hair.

"Muichi motsu, do you know of it?"

"I'm tougher than I look," he says. "Promise."

There's a stool clicked into a bracket against the wall and he pulls it loose, sitting as Koumyou returns to the bed. He's still giving the other man space-- room to breathe, room to think.

The words are unfamiliar and he shakes his head. "Never heard of it."

Koumyou hums to himself in thought, and folds one leg up onto the edge of the bed before him, horizontally. The fingers of both hands grip his shin through his jeans, less out of any necessity to hold the position and more... for something to do with his hands.

"Muichimotsu, or roughly, 'hold nothing'," he recites, "If you meet Buddha, kill Buddha. If you meet the patriarchs, kill the patriarchs. Free of all, bound by nothing, you live your life simply as it is."

Koumyou's gaze drops from Devero, to the floor. He's not really seeing it, though.

"Everyone has their own interpretations of these teachings, that's just how it is. For me..."

He has to think about it for a second. "I... watched so many people I cared about die, you know. The impermanence of life... the inevitability of death. It was comforting to think... there was nothing I could do about it anyway, right? So I may as well just... let go of them."

It's so hard to try to put into words, but he's trying.

"I let myself care about the people I cared about, sure, but how much? When it was time for them to die, I just... over and over. Just..." Koumyou lifts his bandaged hand into the air, closed, and opens his fingers like he's dropping a fistful of ashes into the wind. "Gone. It's the only Buddhist teaching I ever passed on to anyone. I taught it to Ukoku, and I watched his soul shrivel away... and I did nothing to stop it."

If there had been anything to do to stop it, was another question altogether. But he hadn't even tried. Ken'yuu hadn't been entirely empty, surely, there must have been a chance. But, in the year they'd traveled together after Ukoku inherited the Muten sutra... Koumyou had just watched, a passive observer to life, as the last flicker of light faded away.

Muichi motsu.

"I even taught it to my son."

Edited 2020-12-14 11:25 (UTC)

Patient and watchful as a stone, Devero listens to what Koumyou has to say, and tries to understand.

It's hard for him. He hails from a world of plenty, a world of ease. Death comes gently for people in his reality, in most cases drifting into lushly appointed hospice facilities to bring peace to the tired and ailing. That's not to say that accidental and intentional deaths don't occur, but those are the exception, not the norm. It's hard to imagine living with so much pain and loss that he would choose to retreat into the kind of nihilistic apathy that Koumyou is describing.

Hard, but not impossible. "It sounds like you did what you needed to, to guard your heart."

"Did I?" Koumyou's hands on his shin squeeze tightly enough that there's likely to be bruises. "I burrowed so deeply into muichimotsu, so hard, I didn't even grieve for my friends. I just watched. Like everything was a movie!"

He shuts his eyes for a moment, steadying himself.

"I can still see Tenkai, covered in his own blood, reaching for me. And I did nothing. I can still see Goudai's blood bursting into the sky, soaking the ground -- and I did nothing. Less than nothing, I trained his killer for a year after! Who would do that?!"

"You would, apparently," Devero says quietly. His voice is... even, his expression reserved as he tries to put himself into Koumyou's shoes. "Maybe a better question right now would be why? Why did you do that?"

"Duty. The Muten sutra needed a protector, and he was Goudai's heir. I named him Ukoku Sanzo, and wandered for a year at his side."

It's Koumyou's turn to draw a knee up and wrap his arms around his leg, but rather than hide his face behind it, he sets his chin on his knee.

"On paper, it was the correct thing to do. On paper, everything I did was the correct thing to do."

It didn't help.

"I was so detached from reality... when you asked if I'd stopped helping people, I realized... I could have looked right at someone who needed my help, and my eyes wouldn't have even registered it."

"It sounds like your world doesn't support those who step up to serve it," Devero says slowly. That's what bothers him the most about this, he's realizing. "It sounds like you had to choose between your duty and your-- your personal integrity. And with a duty as enormous as yours, guarding your sutra-- sutras-- who could blame you for making whatever sacrifices you needed to?

"But you shouldn't ever have had to make those sacrifices, not to the extent of-- of having to train the person who murdered your friend!"

His lip curls. "Fuck that, and fuck the flawed system that forced you to."

Koumyou watches Devero, observes the anger on his behalf, and...

It's still like watching a movie. Talking about it now, watching an outsider's reaction. It should make him feel something. Something real! Something--!

It doesn't.

He shuts his eyes.

"I think something's broken, in me. Or just... missing."

Koumyou doesn't realize he's said the thought aloud until he hears it in his own voice, though it sounds distant to his ears.

"Trying to live by muichi motsu... I can't even believe in it, anymore. When death came for my son, I... I couldn't."

"Or maybe it's hiding," Devero suggests gently, "until it's safe to come out again."

He leans forward a little, clasping his hands between his knees. "--What happened to your son?"

"We were attacked," now, Koumyou hides his face, his forehead resting on his knee.

"He had to watch me-- I-- I couldn't stand there and let him die. Not Kouryuu! So I--"

A deep, shaky breath.

"I locked him in place so he couldn't interfere, and I took the attack myself."

Now he's feeling, and he's feeling too much, the denim of his jeans starting to wet from tears.

"He had to... I know what it's like, to watch someone ripped apart like that, someone you care for. To feel their blood rain down on you! And now he's a Sanzo, and he's only thirteen, and I didn't-- there's no one--"

And now it's Devero's turn to hear a muffled sob, ripped straight out of Koumyou's heart.

Devero has been leaving space between them, space for Koumyou to wrestle with himself and space for Devero to absorb what he's being told. But he can't leave that space open now, not when he hears the other man sob like that.

He's on his feet and across the space between them in an instant. His fingertips brush Koumyou's shoulders, wordlessly offering the space between his arms.

It's only once he's already there that the import of what Koumyou has said sinks in. "Sanzo... did you die?"

Koumyou can't... move, he can't get up from the bed and take Devero up on that silent offer, can't un-clench his wiry arms from around his own leg. But he also doesn't shrug those fingers away from his shoulders.

He just... nods, and sobs, all of him shaking under the pressure of it. His tears are for his son, not for himself. His son who had to watch him die, and now bears the weight of at least one sutra, eventually two, and with no one to show him the way.

Koumyou knows his son is strong enough. He does! But that doesn't mean he hasn't been thrust into a living hell. That doesn't mean he should have had to see that. Kouryuu -- Genjo Sanzo -- should have gone his whole life without feeling his adoptive father's life blood rain down onto him. Without hearing it, seeing it, smelling it sprayed across a room.

He doesn't have to get up. Devero's arms are long enough to wrap around him where he huddles, and he doesn't hesitate to do just that. He tucks the priest's head under his chin and holds him.

What can someone like him say in response to something like this? Koumyou's grief seems more profound to Devero than any loss he's ever suffered; the burden he's left to his son an incomprehensible one to a man from a world without magic. Not for the first time, he feels small in the face of who and what Koumyou is.

But he holds him regardless, and he whispers the only thing he can think to into Koumyou's hair: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Koumyou shakes like he's being rattled apart from the inside, but he leans into Devero anyway. And eventually he even manages to pry his arms off his leg, and grab onto the front of the bigger man's shirt instead.

"I failed him," he gasps out, still weeping, "I failed my duty, I failed the one teaching I ever passed on... but I couldn't watch him die! I couldn't!"

Devero is a man who hails from a world where community allegiance is valued higher than any individual bond or responsibility. He's a man who understands that duty is supposed to come before any personal bond. The citizen sacrifices for the community, not the other way around.

Devero is also a man from the world where children are so precious a resource that they all grow up as wards of the government. To care for children is considered one of the highest aspirations a person can have. And he's a man who's yearned for family, so desperately that he put his well-being into the hands of a woman who saw him as a compliant commodity.

To Devero, this seems simple. Maybe it shouldn't, but it does. "You saved his life. What else could you do? He's your son."

And yet, strictly speaking, by the rules of his position? Koumyou was supposed to have stood by and watched his son be ripped apart. He was supposed to put the safety of the Seiten and Maten sutras above all else, and even his closest... friend? had assumed his adherence to muichi motsu was absolute.

But in the end, it couldn't be.

It just couldn't. He just couldn't.

The priest's sobs continue to wrack his thin frame, the man weeping like a dam has been broken inside him. But eventually, he starts to calm down. Even if his mind is still whirling in that storm, his body has begun to run out of the energy to sustain it.

Slowly, eventually, Koumyou just... slumps there, in Devero's arms.

"I would immolate myself here and now if it would somehow help him," Koumyou says softly, his exhaustion heavy in his every word, "I would string my guts the length of the train. I wouldn't hesitate."

But there's nothing he can do.

Even if the train sends him on his way... he's dead. There is no going back, now.

Edited 2020-12-15 04:15 (UTC)

Devero will hold him for as long as he needs. The dam may have broken but there's a core of bedrock inside Devero; Valdana's been chipping it away, bit by bit, but she hasn't worn it down yet.

"I believe you," he says. He loosens his arms, but only so he can hold the priest out at arm's length. He tries to catch his eye. "And Sanzo?" --That seems so impersonal. "Koumyou Sanzo, I think I would have done the same thing in your place, if it was my child's life on the line."

Turn and turn about they go, two celestial bodies rotating around a common center of gravity...

Koumyou doesn't meet his gaze, for once, his head drooping, long bangs hiding his down-turned eyes.

"I failed my duty to protect two sutras, threw aside the only teaching I ever passed on, and damned my son to a cruel memory and an even crueler life as the youngest Sanzo to ever exist. And one without a mentor, to boot."

He sounds so resigned. So tired.

"And if that teaching was wrong, then I also failed every friend from the first squad who I watched die. And I failed Tenkai Sanzo and Goudai Sanzo, by doing nothing."

Edited 2020-12-15 04:38 (UTC)

Devero releases him entirely, but only so he can sit beside Koumyou on the bed. He's silent for a moment, considering, before finally saying, "You understand your duty, and the consequences of your actions, more thoroughly than I can. I won't damn you or absolve you of the choices you made. I can't do that.

"The past is what it is," he continues. "Whatever regrets you have now, you can't change what you did then. The only thing you can change now is what you'll do from here on out.

"So-- I guess my question to you is, what do you want to do, going forward? If the person you were before you died for your son brings you so much pain, who's the person you're going to be now?"

Koumyou leans heavily against the bigger man, and rests the side of his head on Devero's shoulder, an exhausted lump of a priest.

"You're right," he murmurs, "I can only control what happens next. But I don't know what that will be. I've been treating my time on the train as a... a strange limbo, in between reincarnations. A waiting room. But I still have a sutra to protect, somehow."

As soon as Koumyou leans against him, Devero wraps an arm around the smaller man and tucks him close.

"You don't have to know right now," he says. "You can figure it out. Maybe-- maybe that's why you're here, instead of-- d-dead. Maybe you're supposed to spend your time here figuring it out."

Religious people believed stuff like that, right?

"Maybe," Koumyou agrees to that much, at least. But Devero's stumble over 'dead' has caught his attention. "...It bothers you that I've died, doesn't it?"

How strange. He's told a few people here that he's dead on his world, but no one really... seemed to give it any thought.

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