#Sandy makes Wukong his special anger management tea | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mosaicofdreamsanddragons · 3 years

Text

Present Smiles

Hello Monkie Kid fandom, I am back and on the Sandy is the original Sha Wujing (or at least a reincarnation that remembers being Sha Wujing) hype train.

Read on ao3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31762732

Sandy liked to focus on the present. There was a lot he could do in the present. Right now he could focus on finding something interesting for MK, poor kid was clearly anxious about something.

Sandy suspected the spiders. It couldn’t be easy to face his fear every day like that.

Pigsy suspected Monkey king’s vacation was reopening old wounds and bringing old fears the surface again. It made Pigsy angry in a way he tried to hide, and so Sandy had lent him Mo for the day and taken the kids off to get them out of his hair.

He’d asked the kids what they wanted to do, and MK’s insistence of going to Flower Fruit Mountain coupled with Mei’s enthusiasm to see the place made it an easy choice.

His own reservations about going to Flower Fruit were unimportant compared to their delighted smiles. If MK was working so hard to face his fears, Wujing could to. And it’s not like his older brother was home anyways

And he could make the overly anxious MK happy by shuffling through the vast amount of stuff in the small house MK had led them too. Hadn’t it been bigger? Something here would surely help the kid calm down. A fun distraction would do more good than a tool right now, so he focused on showing only the most interesting knickknacks his older brother horded in his house.

Not that they did much good.

Maybe he should have taken one of Mo’s fellow therapy cats with them, one that specialized in anxiety.

At least MK had started playing a game now, even if he was approaching it with all the zeal of a lesson.

Then again, he seemed happy to play and confident enough to skip the tutorials. Sandy took out his tea and offered a cup to the bored Mei, but she turned it down in favor of watching MK skip the dialogues with disapproval.

“He’s going to regret that,” she whispered to Sandy, “I skipped the tutorials on Monkey Mash for years and totally didn’t know a basic move that made the game five times easier…”

“At least he’s having fun,” whispered back Sandy as MK entered the store and…

That gentle smile flat and lifeless on a screen, the voice mechanical and garbled not warm and real, closing his eyes when he was trying to instruct in wisdom frozen in place not moving and alive…

…that disappointed frown…

MK was right, Wukong had made this game.

Wukong’d clearly done his best but Wujing's heart ached to see their teacher so close but so so fake

Caught up in trying to mentally fix the wrongs with the stilled image he let MK’s enthusiastic reactions fade to the back of his mind. What would it take to fix the errors of the flat picture? The voice would lack the mechanical background and would take on a slightly pretentious tone when he tried to instruct them, like Tang’s did, chest lightly moving with each breath. But he couldn’t quite animate the pictures in his mind, not without it feeling oh so very wrong.

Perhaps he could start with a base? A living breathing person who he could then imagine the features of his teacher on. Tang would work, there was some resemblance there….

So wrapped up in his thoughts was he that he only barely caught Mei’s statement, “kinda looks like…”

“Tang? I know I thought the exact same thing,” he says with a grin, glad to be pulled from his memories.

“Ahhh, right” says Mei. He’d missed something here, but he didn’t let the nagging sense of some mistake bother him. Time to focus on the present.

The present was a bored Mei and an MK who grew increasingly more frustrated with the game he was playing.

Wujing was ignoring his form on the game, the anger in his 2D eyes who only existed to fight …

Why is that how everyone remembers me? Is this really how he remembers me? As that angry fighter?

Wujing wasn’t like his older brother. He didn’t hide himself away from his grief. No, Wujing got angry. So very angry, until he saw the consequences first hand for a familiar-but-not face. And he’d tried so hard to fix that, to let go of the anger, to be more than that.

Bajie, no this was Pigsy, on the ground hurt…again, no not again this was Pigsy not Bajie…and it had been his fault, his fault…and still he was so angry, so angry that this had happened. Longing to punch something, he’d turned to find a convenient tree or pole, only to catch sight of a too-familiar disappointed frown out of the corner of his eye…

…and the anger drained from him. He looked back to Pigsy. Right now, in the present, he needed to help his friend to a hospital. There would be time for anger later.

When he’d looked up again the frown and its owner had been gone, and when he’d come back to search for it all he’d found had been a cat pawing at a flyer for anger management therapy.

He shook his head and focused his attention on the present, which was entertaining Mei. For a few hours she was content to watch MK play and complain about his moves snarkily into Sandy’s ear (somethings run in the family Wujing supposed). But after that she grew restless.

Sandy proposed meditation and tea (he rather thought he’d earned it) but she was more interested in digging through the house for something to entertain herself in the piles and piles of Monkey King Merch and assorted trinkets. So he joined her, letting himself focus on the moment and her enthusiasm, her laughter at his finds, and not the past emotions burning under his skin.

“What is this!” she squealed holding aloft a plush green dragon.

“A seahorse?” he suggested. It did look a bit like a sea horse. He wondered if that was an intentional joke or if the creator had just sacrificed recognizability for cuteness.

“It’s adorable!” she said before tearing through the old chest for more. Soon adding a smiling pig with too big eyes, a Monkey whose head was all out of proportion, and a man with a red beard, mouth too big for his face.

He picked the plush version of his past up and realized the mouth had been stitched over. The difference between the smooth manufactured stitching and the later additions was painfully obvious. Two little curved lines had been added to either side of the mouth with a thread that didn’t quite match and stiches that were too large and uneven.

“Awww,” said Mei from behind him, “He’s smiling!”

“He is,” said Wujing softly, cradling the store made doll in his hand and tracing the his brother’s clumsy correction with his thumb and struggling to name the emotion that was rising inside him and stealing his ability to speak.

“Hey, um” said Mei, awkwardly patting his arm. “Would you like some tea?”

He glanced down at her blurry form, blinking himself back into the present, “That would be lovely, Mei.”

Mei did not, in fact, have a teapot to make tea from the leaves she’d found. In the time it took for her to find one (eventually he’d just left his sitting right on the table for her to “discover”), he probably should have checked what the leaves where. But he didn’t and now Mei was out like a light.

He tucked her in with the plushie version of her ancestor and glanced the other child under his watch. MK was still frantically playing away at the game battering his way through the 2D versions of the past. But as he watched he found himself more concerned with the boys own health then an anger and an old grief. Perhaps later he could convince MK to have some of the tea Mei had discovered, a nap might do him some good.

He filed that away as a plan for the future.

Right next to catching up with his older brother.

#monkie kid #lego monkie kid #Sandy #monkie kid Sandy #Monkie kid Sha Wujing #Monkie kid Mei #long xiaojiao #Monkie Kid MK #qi xiaotian #my fic

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