Reverse

Chapter 6 // Promise

The way his successor shuffles over to him spells nothing good. Wukong stares up at him, heart pounding.

“....what did Tang say?”

MK swallows. Wukong tracks the very visible gesture and finds his own throat drying at the look his student gives him -and the way the young man flicks his eyes down to Liu’er.

“...is he asleep?” The boy whispers.

Wukong nods stiffly, feeling his arms wrap just slightly tighter around his little brother. It brings Mihou’s head closer to his neck; the steady sounds of his breathing and the puffs of hot air against the collar of his neck settles something rattled in his chest. “...yeah.” He murmurs.

The way his successor eyes him leaves his tail flicking with unease.

“Can…is there a way you can keep him asleep?” MK hesitates. “So he doesn’t wake up and hear? O-or we can go to another room.” The kid looks away, glancing towards the bedroom.

“This is fine,” Wukong interrupts, because it is true -he can keep Mihou asleep if he wishes to. The spell is second nature to him, even if the last time he’d used it was a long, long time ago, and back then his little brother barely reached his chest. A young teenager, but in Wukong’s eyes still a little baby.

He’d been what, six hundred years old?

Seven hundred?

Too little, Wukong thinks.

Even when Mihou got to his height, or close to it, Wukong never really got rid of the habit of picking up the other monkey, tossing him up into the sky and listening to his half-laughter, half screams of being put down because 'I’m grown up now, Wukong!'

He’d only curbed in while in the company of others, to save Mihou the embarrassment. In the privacy of their home, he’d had no mercy for what in his eyes, will always be his little shadow.

…then everything else happened.

Chasing those thoughts away, he sits up on the couch. Mihou slides against him, boneless in his exhausted state -he’d cried himself to sleep, a fact evident by the still visible tear tracks Wukong delicately tries to wipe away with too trembling claws.

Ignoring the weight of MK’s curious gaze on him, Wukong quickly mutters the sleep spell and watches it take hold over his little brother, a mere dusting of gold magic dancing briefly over the child’s nose. With Mihou already asleep, it latches on easily; satisfied, he plucks a hair off himself, makes a blanket out of it, a soft dark gray wool. strengthens it with magic to make it real, and wraps Mihou in it.

Distantly, he hears MK whisper something under his breath. 'Burrito.' He files it away.

“He’s not going to wake up until I let him.” He finally states, looking up at MK. “So? What did Tang say?”

“He…okay, I’m just going -just going to say it all at once.” “He talked to a few experts, including people who had been studying the urn already. It was cursed to erase whoever desecrates the ashes in it from existence-” “-the spell is either a time reversing curse or a age stealing curse, but they think it’s the later.”

“...so it could be permanent.” The words leave his lips without any real input from the person controlling them. His head feels…a bit light, as he slowly registers what exactly his successor is telling him -and the meaning behind those words.