Tragedy of the Shadow

Following after the Shadow

First few days were a disaster. Wukong was walking aimlessly around the city in his joke of a disguise. He searched the market countless times far and wide and wandered in the direction he last saw the shadowy figure run off, hoping that maybe that person would show up around here again. That maybe they hang around more frequently or have a routine of passing this way. Yet his search turned out to be pointless, just like observing the spot for several hours every day. There were no traces left, and when he asked around no one even knew who he was referring to.

It was as if this person truly was only a pigment of his imagination. A nasty hallucination that took the face of his old friend to mock him out of nowhere and break his peace. As if he couldn't just get a break. Like it was his destiny to suffer and never be free of his past mistakes, that would always come crawling back to him, no matter the place or time, to haunt him mercilessly forever.

No.

No, no, no. It was too real. It couldn't be only his imagination. Or at least he couldn't believe it. Because if he would, if he would give in this narration it would only mean he truly had gone insane. So he needed to keep going, he needed to find out the truth. The proof of those scraps of his sanity existing. So he kept searching.

At one point it started to become a daily routine for him.

Wake up. Eat. Make a run around the mountain checking the monkeys. Train MK. Eat. Go to the city. Fail to find your apparently-not-dead-anymore friend-turn-enemy. Go back to FFM. Make another run around the mountain. Eat. Look to the night sky overthinking everything and souking in your failure. Go to sleep. Repert.

He found himself more and more irritated and angry each time he came back to his hut empty handed. And slowly this chase started to drive him insane. He would forget to eat in his routine and lost hours at night looking to the moon instead of sleeping. The worst thing in all of that was he could almost feel shadows around mocking him. Laughing, observing, following. He couldn't see Macaque in them no matter how many times he tried to pick at him in the darkness with his Gold Vision, but he knew. He just knew he was there. He must be right.

It got to the point when instead of sleeping and looking to the moon, he started drawing to get his mind off all those complicated and conflicted feelings. He drew Macaque in this dark robe with red clouds he saw that day on the Market to get the image out of his head in case he would forget. He didn't draw a Six-Eared monkey face, not because he didn't remember it already, no. The image of his past friend's face twisted in frown then agony was somehow still vivid in his mind, and every time he tried his hands were too shaky to even draw a first line. But he didn't know how long this chase was gonna last and he was scared the image of the silhouette would soon get cloudy. Wukong also used it as a poster of some sorts, now going with one of the drawings and showing it to the people around the Marked, sadly it also didn't help.

He tried to keep it together at least on training with MK. The kid didn't need to know about his mentor's slow path to insanity. At least until it becomes everyone's problem, eventually. He hoped he would solve this before it does tho. So he tried to play it cool. Pretending he's not constantly distracted by the smallest movement of shadows around and that he's not trying to finish the training faster and faster to go back to his pointless search. And somehow he was able to avoid suspicions from his student, or at least he did so for a few first days.

Wukong and MK were having a small break from their sparring. One of those rare days when the boy had a break at Pigsy Noodles and wasn't meeting with Mei, so obviously he was on Flower and Fruit Mountain longer. And training aside, MK actually liked to spend time with this centuries-old monkey, even if Monkey King couldn't believe someone could, for MK it was never boring and he loved some backstory! And, well, Wukong had hundreds of years worth of backstory. For obvious reasons, some stories weren't told.