escapefromreality | Fic: Giving Back (Saiyuki) (Reply)

A postgraduate student in the elite Keiun University discovers he has to take part in a social aid project. He'd rather stay home with his books and his years-long depression.

"Are you kidding me?" Kouryuu said, glaring at the pamphlet he'd just been handed. "Who the fuck's idea was this pious waffling bullshit about outreach and mission? I'm trying to write my damn dissertation."

"We should give back to the community," Feixing said casting her eyes upward to Heaven. "It's proper for students of this degree with aspirations for ordination. Even those who took most of their undergrad classes while they should have been in middle school." She looked meaningfully at his hair. "And could have been ordained as novices then as well."

"Whatever," Kouryuu muttered. "Do I look like a monk?"

"Everyone says that your father –"

"Shut up about my father."

"Well, obviously I mean your adoptive father, a man like that wouldn't compromise his vows –"

Kouryuu rounded on her. Why did everyone have to fucking hound him about Koumyou? It was no one's fucking business -

"Listen, you. If you think I won't tell you exactly what I think of you, you are very, very wrong. My father is none of your business. Just tell me what this half-assed project is and if we get credit for it."

She blinked at his vehemence, scratching at her own buzz-cut scalp. "We get airdropped into the earthquake zone on the colony world and help haul out injured people –"

"We're slacker postgrads with no training in rescue."

"The Merciful Goddess will –"

"For fuck's sake."

"The student union argued to make it fifty percent of the final grade in the mandatory human rights module. Didn't you go to the meetings?"

Kouryuu slammed his head against the doorpost. Once, twice, and stopped at her expression. It seemed safer than slamming hers, and his skull was pretty hard.

"No," he said, seeing stars.

* * *

The town was devastated. Buildings were slumped into piles of rubble, and everything was torn to pieces. The addition of a couple of hundred do-gooder students wasn't really helping, although eventually they were put on shifting rubble and kept away from areas that might actually have survivors. People who knew what they were actually doing worked on those.

Kouryuu stood out in a ruined street at night, long after his shift had finished, a cup of something that was meant to be coffee in his hand. His hands wouldn't stop shaking, which was fucking annoying. He was tired of seeing people laid out under sheets. He desperately wanted to be back in his room back at Keiun, safe and surrounded only by books. It was so much easier than being harassed though actual monastic life as a kid and starting your theology degrees so early. There was no point in wishing, it wasn't going to happen. He toasted the moon, floating serenely over it all.

"Don't worry, I'm doing my bit," he said, and sucked down the alleged coffee. Vile. "I'm fine. You didn't have to fuck everything around just to get me to go outside."

Help.

It was just a breath on the wind. There was nothing else. There were other people around but no one seemed to have heard. Kouryuu frowned, sure he'd imagined it, then he thought how small and young the voice had been; what it was like to be small and young, and terrified –

It was ridiculous. That voice hadn't been sent to him. That sort of thing was a fairy-tale. He looked up at the moon again.

"You don't have a message for me, right, Dad?"

Please. Help me -

Shit. Oh, shit. Why the hell had he wandered all the way out here? By the time he called this in and people with experience showed up maybe the kid wouldn't be calling any more. The sound had come from – He looked around and sprinted to the building that had stood back from view behind a tall fence, now flattened. A wall still stood haphazardly upright, and a section of stucco-faced windowless wall was propped up on a sturdy staircase.

"Hello? Hello, can you hear me?"

" -lp me!"

There was someone there. Shit. He eased himself under the section of wall, eyeing it suspiciously. It'd fucking go any moment, he was convinced.

"Are you down there?"

"Please! Please get me out!"

Merciful fucking Kannon, that really was a kid. Dammit. He should go and get the guys with the equipment – the wall made an awful groaning noise. Before he could think, Kouryuu found himself going down the stairs, hugging the side as if that would stop him being buried alive. He was a fucking idiot, playing the fucking hero. Trying to expunge years-old guilt for not saving – he grimly turned his mind away from that. No need to bring on one of the goddamn guilt spirals on top of everything else.

At the bottom of the stairs was –

What the fuck?

A metal door that looked like a fucking bank vault. One that had buckled and warped in the earthquake and now stood ajar. It wasn't something anyone might expect to find under a suburban house. Unless he was about to go into some pervert's lair. Fuck. He pulled the heavy door open a few more inches and slipped in. then he just stood there, staring.

It was a lab, lit by flickering emergency lights. There were biological samples lying everywhere, a DNA sequencer, broken equipment flung to the floor, and through another door, climate controlled uterine banks with five foetuses in varying stages of development. The readouts were all in the red. Kouryuu kept his hands off everything, looking for the kid who had called, then –

"I can see you."

From beneath a blanket, a small face peeped out. The kid was in a cage. A fucking cage. He was also clearly a Cat-B kid, with heavy brow-ridges, overly broad shoulders and long arms for his size and a little button nose that probably some idiot girl would think was cute. Kouryuu sighed and picked up a microscope and bashed the padlock open. The kid could probably have forced it himself, but dammit, he was just a kid and no doubt thought all locks were impassable.

"Why are you in a cage?"

"I'm always in a cage," the kid said, like he was being reasonable.

"What the hell? Get out here." The kid didn't move. Kouryuu sighed and held out his hand. "Come on, kid. Let's go and get some fresh air. No more cages, OK?"

The kid crept out, putting a little hand in his. "I was scared!"

"Yeah? Come on, we have to be careful going upstairs. Who put you in the cage?"

"The doctor!"

"Does this doctor have a name?"

"I just call her "Doctor." She makes babies for people!"

Kouryuu squeezed back out from under the wall and turned to help him, but he had already eeled out cheerfully. An unlicensed facility for giving people children. Fantastic. Dealing in just Cat-B citizens? Probably the kid wouldn't know.

"Did she make you for someone? Or are you her little boy? Is the doctor a Cat-B citizen?"

The kid shifted from one foot to the other. "I'm an improvement on previous attempts," he said at last. "I have to do good on the tests. What's a Cat-B citizen?" He smiled hopefully up at Kouryuu. "I'm her real work! She says there's no one made like me! The babies just pay the bills."

Kouryuu blinked. He had rescued an illegally-created, experimental, No-Category human, whose existence contravened the Gene Laws. This child would be lucky to find himself categorised along with the social outcasts whose parents had brought them into the world without proper child-licences, or by unapproved genetic mixture of two Category-Bs. He was an experiment, and could legally simply be disposed of as biological waste. Not that anyone did that sort of thing any more. Surely.

"Do you have a name?" he said, hearing his voice as if from far away.

"The doctor calls me Goku."

"Goku, my name is Kouryuu. You come with me." He paused, struck by a thought. "Actually, just stay here a moment." He squeezed back under the wall and down the stairs again, grimly ignoring the creaking sound they made. In the lab he picked up the microscope he had used to beat open the lock and the padlock itself, and ascended to the surface, gasping as he emerged, covered in dust. "Right. Let's go."

On the way back to the rescue workers' camp he flung the microscope and padlock, covered in his incriminating DNA, far off into a heap of rubble, and swung the exhausted Goku up into his arms. A lost child without documents, he decided. That he could argue should be fostered by someone who'd been in the very same position. It was fucking karma: the faculty would love it and might actually weigh in behind him. Especially with Koumyou's will and estate to help out.

He looked up at the moon in irritation.

"Honestly, Dad," he muttered. "Don't you think you're laying it on a bit thick?"

There was no answer. He trudged on, the half-sleeping child in his arms, trying to formulate some sort of plan to keep him safe.