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The first thing Sun Wukong learned about dead bodies was that they’re a mess.
The first thing Sun Wukong learned about messes is that they attract flies.
And the first time Sun Wukong payed attention to flies was when he learned how loud they were.
He watched as the fruit fly landed on his partner’s ear. It was unsettling to not see it twitch in response.
Out of… something, the king squished caught the fly in his fingers, and threw it into what was surely a growing pile behind him.
“You know, when I heard about your first death, I didn’t believe you.”
He stared at Macaque’s mouth, somehow still being surprised when it didn’t open to give some snide remark about his stupidity.
“When I left you there, after our fight, I kept thinking to myself ‘you went too far this time,’ but I had faith in you. I had faith in the name I erased in the Book of Life and Death.”
He croaks out a laugh, trying to swallow back his tears.
“It took me way too long to learn how to read Chinese, you know. There’s just so many characters to keep track of. At some point, I became convinced that it would be easier to teach every human Monkey Speak rather than learn their language myself.
“But the first hanzi I ever memorized was the one in your name. Liu. I remember you told me ‘It’s just a peach on a table, Wukong!’ and then it just… clicked. ‘Liu’er Mihou is the peach on the table’, and that’s how I always knew it was your name. Because you’re my peach.”
He smiled, a genuine warmth crept into his face, before it made him starkly aware of the cold in his hands.
“It’s cheesy, I know.”
The king paused a bit, collecting his thoughts, waiting for the right moment to continue his story.
“I was so happy when you asked me to write our names on that tree. What was it? To ‘immortalize our friendship’? Gods, we were stupid, silly, stupid kids.
“I begged you to let me write your name for you, to show you how much I had learned!”
He laughed. A proper, hearty laugh. That’s what it felt like to the monkey who hadn’t felt a lick of happiness in days. In reality, it was likely no more than a light giggle.
“I proudly wrote down the Liu character, loudly announcing ‘and there is my little peach!’” He snorted, as though about to get to the punchline of a really good joke. “And then you asked me to write the other three!”
A good joke it was. To him, at least.
“Gods above, I wish I could’ve seen my face! I had no idea how to do the other characters! I was flabbergasted to see you write the monster that is Mihou.”
The laughter abruptly stopped as the hero fixated on the warrior’s blank face. The memory of a millennia-old Marshal Liu bidding the two monkeys goodbye before the final seal was placed came to mind.
“I guess I didn’t learn your whole name fast enough, huh?”
Wukong watched as an ant crawled over to the stream in front of him. The stream had been deeper before, he remembered that much. Sometime between the incident and arriving back home, he fell into a sort trance. He didn’t know why, but he felt a compulsion to dress every wound that the corpse had.
He knew it couldn’t heal. That the bandages wouldn’t help the clotting of any blood. The balms wouldn’t soothe any pains. No comfort would come out of grooming the knots out of mud-caked hair.
But he didn’t care. He had been through these motions so many times that it was second nature.
And so, the Monkey King continued to change the bandages of his other half, adding a dam to the waterfall that fell from a gaping wound, hoping to stop the winding river that tricked from it indefinitely.
He glared at the aforementioned ant, now crawling out of a particularly deep segment of the draining body, seeming none too bothered by the fact that it was swam through a pool of blood. He couldn’t help but feel jealous, hoping he could one day be just as indifferent around liquid ever again in his long life.
“It’s funny, I’ve still been thinking of you as my ‘mate’ this whole time. I guess that’s a ‘dead’ title now, huh?” He laughs quietly. Not because what he said was actually funny, but because he felt a compulsion to. Centuries of practice demanded that he laugh at every pseudo-joke he makes, lest the audience find him stale.
The audience of none.
“I wasn’t lying to you. It really did take me such a long time to believe that you died. The first time, at least,” another laugh. “It felt… awful.”
He gazed at Macaque’s unmoving face, imagining a response for him.
“Yeah, yeah, I’d better feel awful after finding out you died, I know. What self respecting being wouldn’t?
“This was a different kind of awful. It was almost like a betrayal. Like, finding out that the fruit you ate was expired three hours after eating it. You think that everything is fine in the moment, but then you learn the truth, and just gotta deal with the consequences.
“But this? This was like finding out that everything that you ate for a decade was poisoned. How—how do you even deal with that? How do you eat every meal without wanting to throw up at the smell of plums? How do you wake up every morning without the fear of the toxins finally catching up with you and finishing the job?”
He realized he was crying. Again.
“How do you live with yourself knowing you’re so incompetent that you can’t even verify that your source of life is safe?”
Wukong took a long pause after that. Taking a moment to collect his thoughts, to stop his stupid tears from falling from his stupid face.
“Gods, you would hate me for this. For comparing you to food. Why am I even crying, right? I wasn’t even the one who died! Who cares about me, right?” He tried to laugh, he really did, but his body had registered jerking motions as a signal to produce tears hours ago, and he only managed to sob some more.
“I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it happen again. I promised I would be there; I would protect you.
“And—and then I can’t even stop Yuan with this fucking water from touching you. Not even when I surround my entire fucking mountain with seals explicitly keeping him out! How incompetent of a partner do I have to be for that, huh?
A tear landed on his mate's cheek, just underneath his closed eyelids. If Wukong had any hope left, then he could have believed that he was crying with him.
The King chirped a reply to his subject, ending one of many short exchanges.
It was a kid, a small ball of fluff barely old enough to fully develop melanin within its fur. She was one of many suns that the generals had sent in hopes of cleaning their monarch.
He knew that she had not visited of her own volition. Sun Wukong didn’t need to rely on his Eyes of Truth to see the fear in the young one’s eyes. The fright in those large pupils, taking in the sight of her king covered in filth and mud and blood.
The corpse of his partner surely didn’t help, either.
No, evidently, this was another one of the elders’ ploys to coax him into a grooming session. Knowing the messy state he was in now, he probably needed one.
The child scampered off, clearly not wanting to spend another moment around the breathing grave that she called king.
Wukong turned his attention back to Macaque, whose corpse was releasing built up air, almost akin to a sigh.
“They’re taking care of me,” he whispers. “I’m in good hands.”
He leans forward to give his partner a kiss on the forehead, the space between his brows now surely stained with red from his bloodied lips.
“So you don’t have to worry about me, okay?”
The corpse “sighs” once again.
And the world return to its silence.
“I keep… I keep running through what I’m gonna do when this is all over. Like this is just another Bone Demon attack, and when we beat the Big Bad, everything’s gonna go back to normal.
“But it’s not. It’s not something where we can all party afterwards. It’s not something I’ll ever get you back from, and the realization keeps hitting me over and over and over again, and just when I think I can breathe? I realize—
“—I realize that I can never see you smile again. That I’ll never hear your voice, or your laugh, or you snoring next to me. That I’ll never hear you shuffling around in the other room, dancing to far off music from a party in the city. I can never feel your arms hugging me, or the sting of a good spar, or your hands gently working through my hair as we watch a really shit movie about us. Every time I inhale, I trick myself into thinking I’ll smell fresh plums, but now my nose is being attacked by nothing but a sour, rotting orchard… And I still don’t want to believe it’s you that I’m smelling, because I don’t want to accept that you’re capable of that.
“We had so little time together. And I wasted almost all of it hurting you.
“I’m such a fucking idiot. I’d—I’d do anything to get you back in my arms, the real, living, honest-to-gods you. To spend the rest of our days getting fat on fruit and sitting in the sun.”
Dawn was breaking on the horizon, light rising from in front of Wukong, landing on his moon in a perfect lunar eclipse.
Maybe, if the sun laid for a bit longer, the moon would rise with it, and they could embrace a new day together.
And until that day came, the sun would remain with the moon in its arms, cradling together for all eternity, no matter the state the two were in.
No matter what trouble the tides brought.