[Fic] Saiyuki: Five books Tenpou keeps next to his bed

[springgreen]

For vom_marlowe: Five books Tenpou keeps next to his bed

No spoilers

1. Even though he must carefully move several stacks off his bed before he can actually sleep there, Tenpou doesn't often read the books next to (or formerly on) his bed. Instead, he abandons them after only reading a page or two; he eyes the teetering towers on his bed and on the floor before carefully balancing the latest discards on top of them.

He does occasionally make exceptions though.

He's been collecting Li Touten's reports for what feels like ages, and probably is, given the rate time passes up here. The earliest reports were remarkably boring, and Tenpou used them in lieu of his usual hot herb tea when he had difficulty falling asleep. Kenren mocked his predilection for tea and instead offered warm sake, but Tenpou found that bureaucratic double-speak was the best remedy of all.

Later on, the morass of words cleared enough for Tenpou to actually make sense of the documents, and he ended up losing sleep instead. He stole Konzen's beloved red marker to circle spelling mistakes, correct the stunning misuse of adjectives, and occasionally just scrawl bemused comments to himself in the margins. He feels he is not a snob, but surely it is an insult that someone with such a tenuous grasp of basic grammar can run Heaven.

Nowadays, Tenpou loses sleep for other reasons. The grammar still frightens him, but the content inside the reports causes the true nightmares.


2. Back before Kenren and Goku had arrived and made his world more interesting, Tenpou would bother Konzen for fun. Konzen had remarked, rather snippishly, that perhaps Tenpou was the true relative of Kanzeon Bosatsu, not Konzen, given Tenpou and Kanzeon's predilection for sly remarks and completely nonsensical statements.

Tenpou is still rather proud of soliciting that comment, although he would like to think that he makes much more sense than Kanzeon. Then again, that's probably because he's not a bosatsu.

But because he is a kind man (or so he tells himself), he eventually stopped poking at Konzen. Naturally, he stopped when Kenren became his to command, as Kenren seemed to have a natural talent for annoying Konzen. Not that he would ever order Kenren to do anything of the sort...

Instead, he simply collects the fruits of Kenren's labor, sheets and sheets of papers and forms with smudged seals just slightly off kilter, and binds them as a present for Konzen.


3. Out of pity, Tenpou is keeping Goku occupied while Konzen goes off to change into even whiter linens, smooth out his three feet of ponytail, obsessively scrub his hands, or whatever Konzen does with his free time. Goku has found the bed and shoved all the books aside. Tenpou's meticulously arranged stacks have collapsed, and while most would say there is no real difference, there was a method to his mess.

"Ten-chan, sorry!" says Goku.

Tenpou stifles his urge to scream, pet his books, and check each page for creases. Instead, he grits his teeth and smiles at Goku, who is now bouncing up and down and up and down on the mattress.

"Whee!" Goku yells. Tenpou's head is beginning to throb a little, and he begins to understand the now-permanent tic by Konzen's eye.

"Goku, wouldn't you like to show me your reading?" Tenpou asks, still smiling.

"Yes!"

Goku is nothing if not enthusiastic. He drags Tenpou back to the bed, his sticky fingers getting Tenpou's already dirty lab coat even dirtier. After Goku has mangled the pronunciation of twenty-one different words and asked the meaning of eighty-two (Tenpou keeps track of important things like this), Konzen comes back to collect the monkey.

The silence is a blessing. But when he picks up Goku's already-forgotten book and absent-mindedly puts it under a pillow, he is unexpectedly, inexplicably jealous of Konzen.


4. Kenren knows he likes books. Of course, Tenpou muses, his habit may be a difficult one to hide.

Kenren also knows he likes the lower world. Kenren is fond of gift-giving, although Kenren's gifts tend to be more random than meaningful. Then again, random may be too kind a word to assign to choices like Kaze to Ki no Uta ("I liked the pictures," said Kenren), a hastily-made rubbing of a stone tablet ("I liked the calligraphy"), or Saikaku's The Great Mirror of Male Love (Kenren shrugged, possibly feeling that no explanation was necessary).

But just when Tenpou begins to think that Kenren is merely bombarding him with gifts for no good reason, the man will casually toss a copy of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms or a book on ramen or a shockingly pornographic collection of shunga on Tenpou's chair (his desk and bed are already overflowing). Kenren won't say anything and often doesn't even leave a note, but three weeks later, Kenren will drag him off to a ramen place mentioned in the guidebook, or Tenpou will find a remarkably skilled haiku in Kenren's handwriting bookmarking the most shocking shunga print. And then, months after Tenpou has forgotten about the latest gift, Kenren will casually mention that Tenpou reminds him of Zhuge Liang in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

This pleases him even more than the comparison to Kanzeon did.

Tenpou also never says anything, but he keeps the gifts (even the pornography) in a neatly arranged stack underneath his bed, away from the normal bibliographic chaos he lives in.


5. Even though he risks death via collapsing stacks of books every night, Tenpou doesn't often read the books next to his bed. Instead, they pile up, each book tempting in its own way, luring him with story, history, lore. But somehow, he never quite gets around to them and ends up bringing more books in from his shelves or his desk or, most often, one of the many to-be-organized-and-shelved stacks on the floor.

And so, even though Kanzeon gave it to him with a wicked smile on hir face (does sie have any other smile? he wonders), Journey to the West sits unread, slowly migrating to the bottom of a stack as Goku's picture books and Konzen's papers and Kenren's random gifts pile up around him.

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