Chapter Text
When it happens, Wukong feels like maybe he’s never actually realized what real pain felt like until now.
It feels like crushing, all-encompassing agony, his head swimming and his lungs too tight and his skin crawling. There’s bone in his sight and blood on his hands, neither of which belong to him, and the sight of it makes him want to throw up. He doesn’t; the only thing that comes out of his mouth are screams, ragged and wild and completely broken.
There’s so many things swirling inside him in a hot, terrible mess, panic and fear and guilt and shame and fear and anger and pain and fear and fear and fear and it just keeps building, crashing through his veins like a hurricane, and he just wants it to stop, but it doesn’t, and he knows it won’t. The only thing that would get it to stop is if time itself took a few steps backwards, and as many impossible things that Wukong has achieved in his lifetime, time is one thing he can’t control.
He doesn’t know what to do. His soul itself feels like it’s being slowly ripped from his being, and he can’t do anything to stop it. He just holds his best friend’s body in shaking hands and screams and screams and screams and prays to anyone that’s listening that this is a dream, a cruel trick being played on him for his many misdeeds, even though with every passing second he can feel that this is no illusion. Macaque is dead. Macaque is dead, and his body is in Wukong’s arms as limp and lifeless as a doll, and Wukong can’t even tell if the wetness covering his chest is more blood or tears. He can feel himself losing control, feel that something terrible is going to happen, something else terrible that he can’t stop, but he doesn’t even want to; the wind is unimportant, the heat radiating from him is unimportant, it isn’t bringing Macaque back or fixing what just happened so it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.
Wukong screams until suddenly everything starts to drain out of him, too fast, the electric fear in his blood vanishing, his body going limp, and he doesn’t know what’s happening but he’s almost grateful for it. Maybe his mind has finally broken clean in half and he’s passing out from the shock. All he can think to do is keep holding onto Macaque as strength leeches from his hands, tangling his fingers in the ripped mess that is Macaque’s chest and pressing his nose into blood-soaked fur until he can taste iron. Don’t leave me, Wukong thinks as he feels his mind shutting down. Please don’t leave me.
***
The next time Wukong opens his eyes, he’s inside. His head hurts, and when he tries wiggling his fingers, they feel sticky. The room is very quiet and dark, save for a few lanterns putting out some faint light from somewhere above him. It must still be night.
Wukong blinks down at his hands and sees the faintest flecks of rust under his nails and everything comes rushing back.
This time it doesn’t hit him like a hurricane. Wukong feels completely numb, with something unpleasant buzzing under his skin, the hint of panic that somehow hasn’t quite gripped him yet. Nothing is wrong; he had too realistic of a dream. The dried blood on his hands is from something else. He’s so aware of the texture of the bedroll underneath him, the presence of a body (alive, and breathing) sitting beside him, the way his head throbs and his hands tremble. The lantern light hurts his eyes.
Wukong raises his head just a bit and looks up at Tripitaka, and the monk’s eyes are already on him. He doesn’t say a word, just sits there and waits for Wukong to speak.
He doesn’t know anything. He appeared just in time to see Wukong lose himself to grief over a person he doesn’t know, and will never know, and surely has questions, but he isn’t asking them. As Wukong’s mind clears a little more, he begins to realize that Tripitaka is most likely the reason for the fade to black, that he must have used magic to bring Wukong down the only way he knew how. The only way he could.
He still has Macaque’s blood on his robes from where Wukong had clutched at them earlier. He chose to stay with Wukong and wait for however many hours it’s taken for him to wake up instead of taking the time to change.
“Where is he?” Wukong finally says. His voice is scratchy, and he needs to clear his throat, but he doesn’t.
Tripitaka waits a moment before answering. “Outside,” he says. “By the house.”
Outside, in the dark, all alone, soaked in his own blood and viscera. Alone. Broken. Alone. “You left him,” Wukong says, dully. He has no right to feel any atom of indignant about that. You left him, echoes in his brain cruelly, over and over again. You left him. You left him. You left him.
“We moved him,” says Tripitaka. “And covered him. That’s all. We didn’t want to make any decisions without your say.”
Wukong nods shakily. “I need to see him,” he says, and his voice comes out choked. He can’t move; the buzzing under his skin is getting stronger, and his breathing feels laboured again. He can’t move, but he needs to see Macaque, needs to reassure himself that none of this is real and he’ll be waiting outside with a smirk and a wink. He can’t move, but he needs to see that he only dreamed something so terrible, that it wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d been tricked into thinking, he only needs to check again and see that everything is okay, nothing is wrong. He can’t move. His chest is tight. His breathing is loud. He presses his hands to his face and smells blood and feels the rust sticking to his cheeks. He can’t move. He’s shaking, and he has to get up, and he has to talk to Macaque, and he knows something is wrong, everything is wrong, and he can’t move.
Tripitaka lays a hand on Wukong’s head and very gently begins stroking his hair. He doesn’t say another word as Wukong curls in on himself and trembles and digs his nails into his face and tries his level best to focus on the feeling of his dear friend trying to soothe him, but it barely helps. The lanterns have burnt out and the sun is starting to peek through the slats of the windows by the time Wukong finally stops shaking.
***
Eventually there’s a light rapping at the door, and Ao Lie pokes his head in, looking across the room at Wukong with trepidation. Wukong doesn’t spare him a glance as he approaches Tripitaka and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Sanzang, go sleep,” he says softly. “I’ll stay with him.”
Wukong, numb as he is, is perceptive enough to realize Tripitaka has spent the entire night sitting next to him in his misery, and is likely exhausted by now. On top of everything, another spike of guilt settles in his chest at having inconvenienced him, even though it pales in comparison to what else he’s done last night.
Tripitaka faintly shakes his head. “You can stay with both of us.”
“Rest,” insists Ao Lie. “We’ll wake you up if anything happens.”
Tripitaka does not move. Ao Lie settles in on the other side of Wukong and rests a hand on his back. Wukong covers his face again and tries to hold onto the lie that none of this is happening and he’ll wake up soon.
***
Wukong lifts the shroud that covers Macaque’s body and doesn’t know how to feel besides bone-deep numbness. It doesn’t look like Macaque. It looks like something that has pretended to be him, and worn his skin in a way that is incredibly bad and wrong. His hair has lost its shine, his skull is caved in on one side, rendering his face unrecognizable. His clothes are stained dark with what used to be safely inside him, and he smells like death and rot.
Wukong tries his best to wash the blood and guts off him, but it barely makes a difference. His body somehow looks even more awful when the excess viscera has been cleaned away. Wukong had thought, foolishly, that maybe once he was clean he would become recognizable again, but the longer he stares at the broken body of what used to be his best friend the less he recognizes him. Eventually he has to close his eyes. He doesn’t want to immortalize this form as Macaque.
Wukong sits beside him for what feels like hours, wondering what the next best move is. He has to do something with the corpse. He can’t just leave him here. All he can think of, though, is that Macaque does not look like himself anymore, and he would hate his own reflection if he ever had the misfortune of seeing it. Wukong wishes so fiercely he could grant him dignity in his death, but he can’t. He can’t even give him this.
After what feels like an eternity, Ao Lie approaches him once more, sitting lightly beside him and not speaking for a good five minutes. “Would he go for reincarnation?” he asks eventually, with hesitance, like he isn’t sure whether or not he’s overstepping.
Macaque would want to come back, wouldn’t he? Could he come back? Would he, if he could, come back to Wukong, or would he be lost to the rest of the world, undetectable even by the great sage equal to Heaven? They’d never discussed death in detail before, certainly not their own. Wukong did everything he could to make sure it wouldn’t even need to be a passing thought. How ironic, he can’t help but think, that the best he could do wasn't good enough, and it all lead to death in the end anyway.
Macaque would never want to see Wukong again. Not after everything. Not after this. “I don’t know,” says Wukong, truthfully. “I don’t know if we even can.”
Ao Lie nods, but otherwise stays silent. After a while, Tripitaka appears from behind him, settling on Wukong’s other side. Delicately, he reaches for the shroud Wukong has discarded and wordlessly drapes it back over Macaque’s body. Wukong is silently glad to be spared the sight, and simultaneously guilty that he can’t handle it. It’s good that he can’t, and he should be forcing himself to look, as punishment, but he’s exhausted, so he doesn’t fight Tripitaka on it.
Wukong knows (thinks) Macaque would probably want to be laid to rest on the mountain. It felt awful to bury him in a place so far from home that he feels no connection to. They’re still so far away, though, and Wukong doesn’t know how he’s going to carry a rotting corpse all the way back.
Wukong swallows down tears and tries to speak. “He should...I should take him to the mountain. He should be back home.”
The other problem that comes with this, though, is that the rest of the monkeys would then see him, and know how horribly his life came to an end, and Wukong has had enough of hurting people. Having to tell everyone that Macaque was dead would break them, and Wukong wonders if it would be easier to just tell them that Macaque decided to leave all on his own, and departed safely by himself for greater shores. It would probably still upset them—everyone on the mountain was always very fond of Macaque, just as much as Wukong—but certainly less crushing than knowing the truth.
Tripitaka shifts beside him. “He isn’t here anymore,” he says gently. “This is just a vessel.”
Wukong nods, everything suddenly hitting him all over again, that the lump of cloth in front of him isn’t Macaque, and hasn’t been him for hours, and is never going to be him again. “But it was him,” says Wukong, his voice breaking. “It was him. He would want to be back home. He just wanted both of us to be home.”
Tripitaka puts a hand on his back. “If we return him to the universe, he can go wherever he wants to,” he says.
It’s kinder, Wukong thinks, than burying him. Macaque wouldn’t want to be shoved into a hole and forgotten about. Macaque wouldn’t want to rot in the ground looking like this forever. Wukong is not ready to let go of him, but he doesn’t really think that giving himself more time is going to do much of anything besides form an unhealthy attachment to the corpse that has no hope of ever being restored. He nods, and Tripitaka nods back. “Tell me when you are ready,” Tripitaka says.
Tripitaka gathers Sha Wujing and Zhu Baijie and the five of them carry Macaque to a pretty spot near the cliff side, overlooking the ocean. Ao Lie brings an armful of wildflowers he’s gathered from the outskirts of the forest, and they carefully arrange them around Macaque’s body and over the most hard-to-look-at injuries, to give the illusion that he’s just gone to sleep in a meadow. Wukong smooths out the last of the wrinkles in his clothes and carefully brushes his hair out of his face, trying to make him look as presentable as possible for the sky. He wishes the others weren’t watching him for this, but he knows he’d regret it if he didn’t do it, so he leans forward anyway and presses one last kiss to Macaque’s forehead before sitting back on his knees and bowing his head.
He doesn’t say anything when Tripitaka prompts him. There’s nothing he could possibly say to sum up how he feels. He barely hears Tripitaka as he begins reciting something, perhaps a prayer, perhaps a spell, and then he gently rests a hand on Macaque’s chest and his whole body begins to shimmer with magic. Wukong forces himself to watch as Macaque’s body dissolves into stardust, golden sparkles and flower petals swirling lazily through the air as the gentle wind carries them out past the cliff’s edge and beyond, over the sea. Wukong watches until the last echoes of light are lost to the horizon, and Macaque’s body and soul are both gone for good.
His friends all move in to huddle around him in an awkward group hug, but however badly Wukong wants physical contact right now, he feels like he doesn’t deserve the comfort. “I want to be alone,” he manages to get out, and Tripitaka and the others all nod and silently stand up, murmuring final sorrys before retreating back to the house and leaving Wukong alone to his grief on the cliff’s edge.
Wukong wraps both arms around himself and bends forward until his forehead is pressed into the grass, and he cries until his throat is raw, until a garden could have blossomed underneath him from all his tears.
***
The world around him is unchanged, but Wukong cannot enjoy it the way he did before. The sun is warm and bright, and the greens of the trees are beautiful, and the air is sweet and cool, and all Wukong can think is this feels wrong. It feels like the universe just doesn’t care what’s happened, how great a loss it’s suffered.
He wants space, so he walks several paces ahead of everyone. He was the one to suggest this path, chosen for how narrow it was, in hopes that the simple act of occasionally having to push aside a branch or leaf would help distract him from his thoughts.
A little bit of time has passed. It’s over. Whatever they were fighting about feels so distant in Wukong’s mind; he knows he was angry, deeply angry, about something, but he can’t comprehend how it could have deserved this reaction from him. From both of them. It feels so small now, like it doesn’t even matter anymore, and Wukong dearly wishes he’d had this clarity sooner so they could have spoken about it like mature people instead of letting their emotions steer them straight into irreversible damage. Macaque was probably in the right, and Wukong completely overreacted. He has nobody to blame but himself, and guilt sits heavy in his stomach like mud.
Wukong had thought the path would distract him, but as the minutes tick on he grows irritable. The foliage is getting in his way, the sun occasionally gets in his eyes. He shoves another branch out of the way hard enough that it snaps in half, and it’s swiftly replaced by another. We don’t care, the leaves whisper. We don’t care that your friend is dead. We are still green and shiny and we don’t care.
Wukong shoves more foliage out of his way and squints as the wind rustles the trees above him and sends a ray of sunlight shining painfully into his eyes. We don’t care, hums the sun. We are as bright and as beautiful as we were before you killed your best friend, and we don’t care.
How cruel is the world that it is still sweet and gentle and beautiful. The warmth of the sun suddenly feels disrespectful, the swaying leaves taunting. Their continued existence is mocking him. Wukong’s entire world feels like it was shattered weeks ago and the sun is still shining and the trees are still standing and the world is still beautiful and it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.
Wukong grits his teeth and pushes forward, and one of the branches catches on his sleeve, and then it’s not the branch that snaps but Wukong himself.
Wukong screams and summons his staff and swings it across the path, and his eyes are closed so he only hears the groaning and snapping of wood as a great many things splinter in front of him, only feels the harsh wind as he forces the forest away from him, to push it as far away from him as possible. There’s the distant cries of birds, startled no doubt by his outburst. Wukong stands there, breathing hard, feeling the buzzing in his veins slowly start to ebb away.
“Wukong,” comes Tripitaka’s voice from behind him, and it doesn’t sound like a warning, but it is firm.
Wukong opens his eyes and stares with growing shame as he sees the destruction of the forest in front of them. There’s a semi-circle of broken limbs and leaves before him, dozens of trees felled in one moment of weakness. The path is technically clear now, the force of Wukong’s outburst strong enough to push the debris out of their way, but it is not worth the harm he’s just caused to the forest. So many trees, no doubt decades if not over a hundred years old, ruined. More innocent things killed again.
Wukong looks behind him and his heart drops when he sees his friends staring at him with varying degrees of anxiety and pity on their faces. They understand, and that’s the part that hurts Wukong the most. He hates himself.
Wukong quickly shrinks his staff and bows his head. “I—I’m sorry, I...I won’t...I’m sorry. Sorry.”
Slowly, the rest of the pilgrims approach, and Tripitaka tries to reach for him, but Wukong ducks out of the monk’s reach. He doesn’t want comfort, or pity, but he forces himself to stay on foot instead of retreating to the sky on his cloud, walking through the damage he caused as if it would absolve him somehow.
Now wholly uncovered by the trees, the sun is free to shine down on him at full force. Wukong fixes his gaze in front of him and keeps walking, bearing the gentle mockery that is the sun’s continued existence.
***
Ao Lie brings him a bowl of something in the evening, interrupting Wukong’s self-inflicted isolation. He takes a seat next to Wukong and holds up the bowl questioningly. “Baije made dinner. You ready to have some?”
Wukong isn’t hungry, nor does he want to attempt to eat anyway. He knows Ao Lie is making an effort, though, so he does his best to make an effort of his own. “What is it?”
“Just stew,” says Ao Lie. “And we have berries for dessert, if you like.”
Wukong doesn’t deserve food, certainly nothing sweet like dessert. He says nothing.
Ao Lie sighs. “Brother, you haven’t eaten in days.”
“I don’t need to,” says Wukong dully. And it’s technically true, his many layers of immortality keep everything running smoothly without need for feeding himself, but there’s no denying that food still does make him feel better. He still doesn’t deserve that, though, so it’s a moot point anyway.
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t need to!” says Ao Lie, sounding troubled. “Don’t you miss eating just for the fun of it? Look, there’s fresh potatoes and leeks in here, it’s delicious! Try some.” He waves the bowl in front of Wukong hopefully, like maybe if he catches a whiff of how good it smells it might entice him to try a bite. Joke’s on him, though, since Wukong is so numb to the world that he barely is experiencing the basic five senses properly anymore. He doesn’t even feel very connected to his body these days. It’s better than the pain he feels when he’s more lucid, though, so Wukong’s not gonna complain about it.
Wukong spares a glance at the bowl. It just sort of looks like brownish green sludge to his eyes. “How can potatoes be fresh? You just pull them out of the ground whenever.”
“Lots of things grow out of the ground,” says Ao Lie. “All vegetables do, actually. Can’t judge anything over that.”
He’s being very persistent, and Wukong hesitates, wondering if he should give in; not to sustain himself, but just to make his friend happy. If he couldn’t do something for himself, he could maybe at least manage doing something for someone else, right?
“Please?” Ao Lie urges. “Just one tiny bite? Honestly, I kind of poured myself too much, I don’t think I’ll be able to finish all of it, so you’d be doing me a favour by helping me out. You know how Baije gets if we don’t finish everything in our bowls.”
Wukong knows he’s lying, he poured exactly the right amount on purpose just to pretend he needs help eating it. Despite that, it’s the final nudge he needs to reluctantly accept the bowl and take a sip. It’s tepid, and he tastes nothing. He suspects that’s less to do with Baije’s cooking and more so just how numb he still feels. The faint warmth of the stew settles in his stomach, and despite everything, he feels a tiny bit of his soul reattach to his body. He thinks he might actually be able to taste the remains of potato and leek on his tongue.
Ao Lie watches him carefully as he takes another sip. “Is it good? Can you guess the mystery ingredient Baije put in?”
Wukong tries to focus on the flavour, but he can’t place anything beside what information he’s already been given. “No.”
Ao Lie sighs like Wukong has personally offended him somehow and settles back on his hands. “I can’t either,” he says, sounding a little put out. “He’s making fun of me for not being able to tell and it’s kind of driving me crazy.”
It’s not funny, not really, but it’s the first thing even close to a joke Wukong has heard in a few weeks, and despite himself, he chuckles a bit under his breath. Ao Lie quickly looks at him, looking pleased at the display of a positive emotion for once, but any amusement Wukong felt has already been doused under a torrent of guilt, guilt that he laughed at all, and is allowing somebody to feed him. He isn’t allowed to feel better. He isn’t even remotely ready to accept that. If he gives into laughter and comfort that means that he doesn’t care anymore, and he’s moving on, and he doesn’t want to move on. He wants to wallow in this sorrow forever until a distant future where he feels like he’s finally done the penance for his crime and Macaque, wherever he is, is satisfied that Wukong has suffered enough to make up for it.
Ao Lie seems to realize what’s happening in Wukong’s mind, and his face falls. “Wukong—”
Wukong roughly shoves the bowl back at Ao Lie, not bringing himself to care when some of it splashes out of the bowl and ends up on both of them. “I’m not hungry.” He waits for Ao Lie to take the bowl back and immediately draws his knees up to chest, hiding his face in them as he feels more heaviness settling inside him. The pain slowly bleeds back, not all at once, just a horrible little tease of what’s to come. His moment of weakness has caused the numbness to begin to thaw, and now he’s going to have to face the grief all over again.
“Do you want me to leave?” Ao Lie asks softly.
“...no,” Wukong says, after a minute.
Ao Lie stays beside him as he slowly makes his way through the rest of the stew by himself, kindly not saying anything when Wukong begins to quietly cry again. He’s been doing a lot of that lately.
Ao Lie doesn’t make a move to leave once the stew is gone, and Wukong eventually leans over and rests his forehead against his shoulder. Ao Lie doesn’t try to touch him, or speak, and Wukong is grateful for it. His mere presence is already more than Wukong deserves.
***
Wukong can’t be around people right now. It’s been at least a month and he feels worse than ever. He retreats to what he thinks is a secluded area close to the river they’re staying by and wraps both arms around his knees and rocks himself gently, trying to focus on the sound of the water instead of the chorus of all your fault, all your fault swirling violently through his mind.
His heart aches. Wukong wishes he could just tear the damn thing out of his chest and be done with it. Maybe the pain of ripping out his own insides would be a sweet relief from the pain that’s been eating his soul alive. He needs it out of him. He needs everything out of him.
Without thinking, Wukong slides a hand under his shirt and digs his nails in.
Agony erupts from his chest, white-hot pain that makes him hiss, but he ignores it and pushes in deeper until he feels bone crack under his fingers and suddenly there is hot blood gushing past his hand and staining the grass. Wukong hunches forward and claws at his torn flesh with both hands, choking back bile and blood as his hand breaks through his ribs and pushes past his lungs and finally closes around his heart. He feels it all too well as he rips it from his chest and stares at it through bleary eyes as it feebly beats in his hand, before dropping it with a wet splat into the grass.
There’s blood in his mouth and gushing in rivers onto his pants, surely staining them beyond repair. Wukong collapses on his side and barely feels the uncomfortable wetness seeping into his thin shirt and sticking to his fur. He watches the remains of his heart convulsing in front of him, emptying itself of lifeblood through its torn arteries, and idly wonders how much he damaged his lungs in the process of ripping the thing out. He’s having trouble breathing. He won’t die, though. He’s never going to die. Ripping out his lungs and his bones and his liver and his stomach and all his intestines would only make him hurt more. Maybe he should do that too. Wukong reaches inside his chest cavity again but finds he no longer has the strength to pull anything else out. How pathetic that the strongest being in the world could be incapacitated by something so small as breaking his heart. He lets his hand fall back against the grass and breathes through the pain and wishes the black spots dancing across his vision would blind him.
Tripitaka finds him eventually, collapsed on the ground, surrounded by violent red. “Oh,” Wukong hears him say, in a strangled voice. “Oh, dear.”
Wukong feels a distant need to apologize, but his chest hurts so badly right now he can’t speak. He’ll apologize later, maybe even take a punishment if he has to. It’s not their dynamic anymore, but Wukong finds himself wishing for it. Tripitaka is going to be furious with him for reverting back to his old violent ways, even if it is directed at himself and not anyone else.
Wukong wants Tripitaka to get angry at him. Mutilating himself hasn’t done anything to mask the grief; it’s seated too deep inside him that even tearing out his entire core did nothing to fix or even mask it. He needs to be overwhelmed by something else. Make him feel guilty. Make him hurt more until he forgets why he wanted to in the first place.
Despite his clear revulsion at the viscera painting the ground, Tripitaka slowly pads over and crouches in front of Wukong, his robes instantly dipping into the spilled blood in the grass and soaking it up. How many times is Wukong going to inconvenience him like this? Even when he tries to hide away and punish himself he ends up ruining someone else’s day. Wukong hates himself even more.
Tripitaka rests a hand on Wukong’s shoulder and stares down at him, discontent plain on his face, but determined to stay put despite it all. His eyes dart downwards to the mess of bright red that is Wukong’s body and linger there for a few moments before he sighs and says, very quietly, “I wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself.”
The disappointment in his voice somehow hurts even more than if he had yelled, and Wukong deserves it, so he welcomes it. Wukong closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Tripitaka’s face, at least. “It’ll grow back. It always does.”
His body is already slowly beginning to knit back together, anyway, he can feel it. His discarded insides are slowly sinking into the ground, where they will eventually be soaked up by the earth completely. His bones are slowly knitting together, and one of his lungs has mostly reformed at this point, if his breathing coming easier is any indication. He could do this again if he wanted to. He could do this every day. Even if it didn’t help, it is punishment enough. He deserves it, after all.
“That doesn’t make it okay,” says Tripitaka. “You’re still needlessly torturing yourself.”
“I deserve it,” says Wukong.
“You don’t,” says Tripitaka, sounding sad for some reason.
“Yes, I do,” says Wukong, not sure why he’s trying so hard to argue for this when it’s not going to change either of their minds on it. He may as well ignore the whole world until his body has reformed and it’s time to do it all over again.
There’s silence for so long that Wukong starts to wonder if Tripitaka’s given up trying to convince him that he doesn’t deserve to feel like this when finally, he speaks again; a question, and it’s so unexpected that Wukong’s eyes fly open in surprise.
“Would Macaque want you to tear yourself to pieces?” asks Tripitaka. He doesn’t sound judgmental, like he’s trying to get Wukong to see what he’s doing is ridiculous. He genuinely wants to know.
The only thing any of the pilgrims know about Macaque is his name. It’s been so many weeks and Wukong has not spoken about him. None of them have asked either, seemingly afraid that even mentioning him will shatter Wukong further.
In any case, if Tripitaka was hoping for the question to guilt Wukong into having a moment of clarity, it doesn’t. Would Macaque want Wukong to tear himself to pieces? Undoubtedly. He would probably revel in it. However bad Wukong is feeling right now, it surely pales in comparison to how he made Macaque feel, both over the years and up to his murder.
Wukong killed him. Wukong blamed his best friend in the whole world who he loved more than anything for everything that had gone wrong between them and then he killed him.
Of course Macaque would want Wukong to suffer as much as he could. It’s only fair, after all. The tears that have been welling up in Wukong’s eyes finally spill over. “Probably.”
Tripitaka is patient. “Why?”
“I hurt him,” whispers Wukong. “I hurt him so bad. We were supposed to be best friends. I wasn’t a best friend to him at all. He hurt me. He wanted to hurt me. He would be glad I’m suffering now. He would be glad I’m punishing myself.”
His second lung has reformed. The bottom half of his ribs are intact again. He watches as the mangled remains of his heart melt further into the blood soaked grass and wonders how much longer it will take for his new one to regrow. Something in his chest is fluttering, weakly but persistently trying to make itself known.
Tripitaka sits with this information for a while. Wukong hasn’t told him anything, but he is vastly observant. He is probably drawing his own conclusions that Wukong will refuse to believe, no matter how true they might be. Wukong has never reacted to anything like this before, not for any of his friends or for anyone he has ever killed (he’s killed so many people, none of them have ever mattered like this one did), and Tripitaka knows it. Macaque was someone special, someone who likely mattered, mattered in a way the pilgrims didn’t, mattered in a way that was so specific and different. Wukong would not be self-harming over losing someone who did not love him.
Wukong waits for Tripitaka to convince Wukong that he is wrong, that Macaque loved him very much and would not want to see Wukong beating himself up over this so much. Wukong waits patiently to hear the pretty lie he knows will be spoken in earnest, with the intent of cheering him up.
“But now he is gone,” says Tripitaka. “And I am here. And I am asking you, as your friend, who loves you, to please not harm yourself.”
Wukong squeezes his eyes shut, sending more tears pouring from them. “It just hurts so much,” he chokes through hot blood and tears.
“I know,” murmurs Tripitaka pityingly. “I know.”
***
Months turn to years. Impossibly, it begins to get easier. Wukong allows his friends to cheer him up and offer words of comfort. He smiles again, and laughs again, and sometimes when the pain isn’t as terrible, he even finds the strength to tell them about him, a little. He can only get so far into the stories before his throat begins closing up with emotion, so over time he learns that it’s better to just stop thinking about Macaque at all. It was Wukong’s fault, and it happened a long time ago, and no matter how much he regrets it with every fibre of his being, it’s over now. Wukong cannot live in the past forever with a ghost while the life he fought so hard for quietly passes by him.
He lives, and experiences joy again, and doesn’t think about Macaque anymore. At least, not on purpose.
Eventually, everyone moves on. Wukong is left alone.
Time passes. Sometimes he’s fine. Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes all it takes is the flash of purple from the petals of a flower and suddenly Macaque has just died and Wukong is mourning him all over again. It happened so long ago. He should be over it by now. He should be over it by now. He should be over it.
He reconnects with some old friends and then shortly after completely messes it up again. And again. And again. He hurts everyone he loves. Person after person he hurts until he begins to doubt that the journey had really changed anything in him at all.
If his master were here, he’d reassure him that surely that is not true, that Wukong’s grown so much since then, the guilt alone is proof enough of that. Wukong objectively knows this. But he clearly hasn’t changed enough.
The Monkey King retreats back to his mountain, and he stays there, alone, and deals with it all by himself, and the world is safer for it.