His height had drafted Gojyo into the Tree Decorating Team. He would have been happier about it if their Fearless-Leader-Pro-Tem had addressed him by name when he asked, but he didn't mind giving Gato a hand. Whatever the dead guy had done to earn himself this hell of an afterlife, he was a goddamn saint now.
He missed his bishop-baiting ally. Hakkai had gone out shopping yesterday morning, and around afternoon Hakuryuu had zipped through the unexpected blizzard with a note: road conditions were abysmal, there was a shortage of village men to cut firewood after a recent border war, and so Hakkai would be back tomorrow.
Well, it was tomorrow now, dammit. And wasn't Hakkai going to be just thrilled when he found out the holy twit had managed to blow up the kitchen while trying to make something called Egunogu. Even Gojyo knew turning a flame on high under brandy was a bad idea. And now there was egg yolk and cream all over the rucksacks, and it was starting to smell. Also, there were pine needles all over the floor.
And Goku's hands were all pricked up and probably infected with berry sap from that wreath-thingy Hazel had made him twist together, and why? Because His Bitchiness wouldn't tell him he didn't have to do what Hazel said, that's why. Dumbass monkey.
Dumbass monk, sitting pretty with his newspaper while the rest of them were too polite not to get taken advantage of. The jerk in the hat hadn't even asked him to help, which would have been fine if it had been good sense instead of either speciesism or kissing up.
Well, Gojyo was not giving up his old pants to make socks out of. What the hell did Hazel think they were going to put in them, anyway, Sanzo's stinky-ass tinned natto?
"Done," Gato intoned solemnly, setting a yellow star on top of the tree, just as the door opened.
Hakkai walked in with a bemused expression and his arms absofuckinglutely full of food, and said, "Goku, will you help me unload Jii--what on earth?"
"All RIGHT!" Goku yowled, leaping to his feet and scattering the paper ornaments he'd been coloring all over the floor.
The eyebrow above the monocle twitched a little. "Was that," he asked mildly, "my colored inkstick set?"
"EhehFOOD!" Goku dodged, and scrambled out to mollify Hakkai by making himself useful. He came back with a dead goose and half a pig, looking just as bemused as Hakkai had. "Huh?" he asked, holding them up.
"Put them in the kitchen please. Yes. Ah, apparently my help was appreciated," Hakkai said, shrugging a little. "The firewood, too, Goku, if you don't mind, and the bottles."
"Why can't Gojyo get it?" Goku demanded on his way out.
"Gojyo appears to be, um, occupied," Hakkai explained to his back, looking perplexed.
"Just a little," Gojyo grumbled, sucking his finger. Personally, he didn't know why Goku couldn't have done the incredibly boring work of sewing popcorn onto an unbelievably long piece of string. He'd been doing a much better job on the paper decorations than monkey-boy, but Hazel had made them switch after he'd taken too long on that picture of the girl. He didn't know what the Easterner's problem was; he'd given her a bikini, for heaven's sake.
"Everyone is being so kind as to help me celebrate my faith's most important holiday," the bishop said in that coy 'surely you wouldn't be such a barbarian as to object' tone that always made Gojyo want to slug him. "Every year we celebrate the birth of--"
"I know what Christmas is," said Hakkai, looking a little annoyed as he surveyed the pile of makeshift decorations. Gojyo had to admit that Hazel's kings and shepherds and animals weren't half bad, although it wasn't a drawing style he was used to. He'd still take Goku's wobbly crosses and lopsided circles over them any day. "Isn't someone missing, Glosse-san?"
"No, I don't think so," Hazel said, complacently. "All the people who should be are here, to say the least."
He probably could have made that sound inoffensive, but he would have had to try a hell of a lot harder.
Hakkai nailed him with a disgusted look Gojyo hadn't seen since Kami-sama, and sat quietly down in the Goku's disaster area. He pulled a piece of the stiff paper in front of him, cleaned and re-pointed his brushes, asked Gato to refresh his water bowl, if Gato wouldn't mind, and got to work.
Hazel seemed to assume that Hakkai was utterly defeated by his Power of Snideness, and bounced over to Gojyo. Tsking at his progress, the pest picked up the other end of the string, attached a needle to it, and started working six times as fast. Well, fuck him. Gojyo hadn't done anything like this before.
"Oooh, what a good job, Hazel-han," he cooed, getting up. "I'll leave you to your needlework, since you're so damn good at it. You must practice a lot."
The newspaper jerked and rustled abortively and Hakkai shot him an entertained look, so he was smirking as he went to see what was taking Goku.
A snow-and-fireball fight with Hakuryuu, apparently. Gojyo grinned at them for a minute, and then came in on his own side.
When they made it back in, frozen and red-faced (pink, in Hakuryuu's case) and slightly scorched, Sanzo was almost done with his newspaper and Gato was bringing Hazel another pot full of popcorn. Someone had started the ham cooking.
Hakkai had a short stack of long strips of black calligraphy, written in the elegant style that was pretty much unreadable to a regular guy like Gojyo, and was working on a picture now, with his colored sticks. He looked up and smiled, and Gojyo plopped down behind him and leaned on his back. "Nice," Gojyo said, looking over his shoulder.
"Thank you," he said gravely. He leaned down to dip his brush into watery blue, and made a careful stroke with it.
"I had to go work on the popcorn when I did that," Gojyo noted.
"Yes, I saw yours," Hakkai murmured in his warmly forbidding 'how adorable; the baby-bullshitter thinks he can snow me and get away with it' voice. "You're cold," he noted.
"Warm me up, baby," Gojyo growled in his ear, grinning.
"Try Sanzo," Hakkai suggested serenely, cleaning his brush and going for the pink. "I'm busy." A corner of the newspaper folded down and a spectacled eye glared, but Hakkai was unreasonable enough not to die.
"No thanks," Gojyo said, not moving. "I almost got frostbite once today already, and that was just my hands."
"Gojyo!" Hakkai laughed, his brush flitting over the paper. "Well, go help Goku, then."
"Yeah," Goku agreed from the fireplace. "Do something useful, erokappa."
"Hakuryuu's helping the chimp," he told Hakkai sweetly. "I wouldn't want to get in the way."
"Don't call me a chimp, you lousy lobster-head!" Goku howled, jumping to his feet with a clatter of sticks. Gojyo made sure to crush some of the bishop's precious popcorn in the wrangle that came next.
When Sanzo's rolled-up newspaper settled the matter, Hazel was staring at them with an expression that said all his worst opinions were justified. Well, screw the sanctimonious little priss. They were having a good time and he was impaling exploded corn on a string. Jerkoff.
Beyond the bishop's back, the strips of calligraphy were slowly joining the shepherds and bright circles on the tree. Hakkai had sensei-face on and was instructing Gato to replace the star on the tree with his picture. Since Hazel was too busy being appalled to tell him otherwise, Gato was doing it.
"Oh!" Goku said, letting Gojyo wrench his ankle out of his mouth, "that's really pretty, Hakkai!"
"Thank you," Hakkai said, looking pleased as he surveyed his woman and her baby.
"And what," Hazel asked, turning to look and not doing a great job at hiding his crossness, "is that?"
"Now everyone is here who should be," Hakkai said blandly. Classy guys like their Hakkai didn't bother to say the 'at the least' part out loud. Gojyo was proud to know him. He himself would have ground it in hard. "After all, Glosse-san, a mother should be invited to her son's birthday party, don't you think?"
The bishop looked so blindsided under the hat as he looked to a disinterested Sanzo for guidance that Gojyo took pity on him. Getting up to sling an arm around his buddy's shoulders and noogie him until he was laughing too helplessly to protest, he said, "Our boy here was raised by some Sisters when he was a kid."
"Oh," Hazel said blankly, his eyes narrowing inward as the idea of the monster-by-so-called-choice being a kid got past his defenses.
Back in his corner, Sanzo actually put the paper down, watching them with shuttered intensity.
"Well, I just think," Hakkai said lamely, "that even though none of us had mothers it isn't--"
"I had one," Gojyo interrupted, wounded.
"My apologies, Gojyo, but that person doesn't qualify," Hakkai said flatly, and went on, "I just think it isn't kind to behave as though no one did. When a mother and child love each other, why separate them?"
"Ah," Hazel said, still blankly, and wandered over to look at the tree. Seeming to regain some footing, he said pleasantly, "Would you like me to copy these over for you? Although I'm a foreigner, my handwriting isn't bad. Actually, I'm surprised."
That yours sucks so hard, Gojyo filled in for him as Sanzo coughed and Goku snickered and Hakkai twitched, a smile growing over his face like frost. "Hey," he said mildly, "it isn't Hakkai's fault you're an ignorant gaijin and can't read grass style."
"It's much like your 'cursive script,'" Hakkai said helpfully, stumbling a little over the harsh, foreign phrase. "They taught it in the orphanage my sister and I grew up in when we were children," he went on, humanizing himself so relentlessly he forgot to flinch. "The traditional blessings of the denomination. 'Blessed is the man who sacrifices his dignity,' 'holy is the person who gives his life,' 'courageous is the woman who gives her children to the world.' That sort of thing."
"Oh," Hazel said thoughtfully, but then he recovered. "Then perhaps," he said sweetly to Gojyo, probably having seen the way Gojyo's eyes had glazed over them before, "you'll read the rest to me?"
He grinned unrepentantly. "Ain't Hakkai's fault I'm an uncultured layabout, either."
"Double negative? You may be right; that may actually be my fault," Hakkai said penitently, playfully. "Perhaps I should have made you come along to the temple when I went to tutor Goku."
Goku made a face to show what he thought of that idea, and Gojyo sprang to give him his comeuppance. Since Sanzo evidently felt that things were already too noisy for a scuffle to make any difference, it ended up with the monkey in ground hold and his face full of pine needles, pounding the floor and laughing while Gato looked on impassively and Hazel stared down pityingly.
Hakkai was hanging the last of his calligraphy strips on the tree by the time it was over, and he said, "Oh, dear. I'll see if there's any marigold left, Goku. That might swell up."
Goku just kept pounding the floor and yelling for Gojyo to let him up, which wasn't going to happen until he thought the simian pogo-stick wasn't gonna just get right up and go at him again, so Hakkai smiled and ducked into the kitchen. He was out again in a second, looking impassive, and Gojyo straightened up fast. He'd forgotten about the exploding egunogu.
"The purpose of this holiday," Hakkai said to no one in particular, "is, as I was taught, to remember to treat people well. Better than one usually would, even."
"Uh-oh," Goku muttered, and scrambled up to hide behind Gojyo. Since Gojyo was trying to hide behind him, it didn't work very well.
"Excuse me, Gato-san," Hakkai said with one of his blandest, least trustworthy smiles, and held up... a towel. "Your assistance will not be required."
Gato looked at him long and sharp. Then he nodded slowly, and folded his legs on his inexorable way down to the floor. While Hazel was giving his shikigami an appalled 'are you abandoning me?!' look, Sanzo actually folded his newspaper and put it down on his lap.
"Was it your intention," Hakkai asked sweetly, poisonously, "to leave your mess for the innkeeper to clean up, or for me?"
Then he had crossed the room with that speed that could almost match Goku's worst. When they had all finished blinking, the hat was in Gato's lap and Hazel's ear was firmly caught between Hakkai's fingers. The two of them were already moving to the door, the bishop dragged along on his toes and sputtering in shock.
"Hot water, Glosse-kun!" Hakkai was rapping out in a voice they hadn't heard before. "Empty the knapsacks onto the table. The laundry soap is in the front pocket. I advise you to take off your gloves."
"You can't--" Hazel started, and then he was squealing.
"Quick march," Hakkai said pleasantly, "or I will tell Sanzo where all your ticklish spots are. And Gojyo, as well."
"...Cho-han!" the bishop squeaked.
"There's no use appealing for mercy," Hakkai said, friendlier now but still adamant. "We youkai are a vicious, ruthless breed, after all. Here's the washboard, Glosse-kun. You should move quickly if you want to be able to start supper with the rest of us."
"Hakkai-sensei's so good with brats," Gojyo said when his friend came out of the kitchen, dusting off his hands.
"Too kind, Sha-kun," Hakkai said cheerfully, and goosed him. While everyone was staring, he knelt unconcernedly and started picking up the leftover scraps of paper. "It hadn't occurred to me before that he was probably also raised by nuns. Oh, Sanzo?"
"What?" Sanzo growled suspiciously.
"I'm afraid a babysitter isn't authorized to give spankings," Hakkai apologized cheerfully. "But I'll be sure to report to you religiously."
"Idiots," Sanzo muttered, his color rising, and picked up his newspaper again.