To Measuringlife, from Iambic ♥
Title: Fallible Gods
Author: Iambic
Recipient: measuringlife
Series: xxxHOLiC, Tokyo Babylon, Cardcaptor Sakura, mentions Tsubasa
Characters/Pairing: Yuuko, Clow, Himawari, Hokuto, Watanuki, Doumeki, Tomoyo, Yue; Yuuko/Clow, Yuuko/Himawari
Rating: PG
Author's notes/warnings: Spoilers for recent Holic/TRC, though not for major TRC plot points.
She watches them all from her position above, or perhaps below. All those children, tangled up in fate, she observes. Sometimes she can untwist them before the knots steal their breath, and sometimes she tugs their lifeless bodies from the choking fetters of the inevitable. She sees their faces in the liquor she drinks, in the smoke she exhales, in the very dust in the air. And the storeroom, ever expanding to hold all the prices paid, waiting until they return from elsewhere to reclaim what is theirs - for a price.
Once she lived as they do, blindly shoving through life as if through a great forest of bamboo, heedless of the branches until they snapped back in her face. Clow saw that when he saw her power, and the infuriating man predicted exactly how her life would be now.
"Yuuko-san," he would say, using her pseudonym in jest, "the day will come when you understand these customers of yours all too well." Then he would sip his sake and smile kindly at her, and she would sometimes fail to suppress the urge to slap him.
She liked to tease him, taunt him with what he didn't have because it was one thing she could hold over him. Perhaps she could have granted that wish for him, had he deigned to ask it. But her prices as ever matched the value of the wish granted, and Clow's wishes were never small. He was a man who could see the future knew the true significance of his wishes, and so she priced accordingly. If she always dressed her best, and served him the best sake she had, well, an esteemed customer deserved such marks of respect. And if they both went away unsatisfied after these meetings - well, some things were not meant to be.
"You do know, my dear," he once told her, "there is no cost for the exchange of feelings, even if they are not returned."
"The answer is no," she replied. They both recognised the bluff for what it was.
--
(This is now: wrapped in soft sheets and a girl who doesn't know where else to turn. She came to Yuuko looking for a release, or, as she put it, "I'd like to touch someone without killing them." The same temporal wards that thwarted a wizard's curse served to grant Himawari's wish, though perhaps not in the way it had been intended.
Then again, perhaps so, for the girl did not seem at all fazed before, and she lies comfortably now, pensive perhaps but not uncomfortable. Her hair has a different feel to it than Clow's; it falls in waves and ripples, zig-zagging across Yuuko's skin instead of draping sedately. But Himawari is not that sort of person, too young and earnest and unaware of the future. Instead of Clow's languorous elegance, she has a vitality about her that captivates Yuuko in an entirely different way.
"I wonder, Yuuko-san," Himawari asks idly, "do you go looking for the cursed, or do they simply manage to find you?")
--
"If you do this," Yuuko warned the girl standing before her, determination incarnate, "you will die."
"And if I do not," Hokuto countered, "my brother will never live again."
"The Sakurazuka will kill him anyway," Yuuko said. "And should the spell work, its effect would utterly devastate Subaru. It is not an easy thing, to see a beloved friend die before your eyes - even if this friend has ripped away all you find true or happy."
Hokuto looked down. "It's more important that he has a chance," she said quietly. "I want him to find a measure of the happiness that I've been lucky enough to know."
"The world he lives in does not beget that sort of happiness," Yuuko warned. "You made that for yourself, for your power is that of hope, and he has none of that now."
But Hokuto smiled her blinding smile. "I think you're wrong about Subaru. He isn't so weak as all that. And besides… happiness takes many forms. He's got enough love for the entire human race, Yuuko-san. All I want to give him is a little of what you call my own power - a little bit of hope."
"Love is a powerful tool," Yuuko replied, and thought of a set of cards, bound in a book protected by the recollection of love now dead and gone. Cerberus should awake soon; what would he think of the world Yuuko now managed? What would anyone think of the great horror and tragedy that their world evaded so slimly? Somewhere, Yuuko knew, there existed a set of twins who had managed to live in relative contentment, because something has to offset the sorrow of these Sumeragi. "A powerful tool," she repeated, "and one he already has a mastery of."
"A very powerful tool," agreed Hokuto. "And in my world, it's set to destroy us, one by one."
--
(Himawari is disinclined to move, which Yuuko finds quite understandable, and so Maru and Moro fetch the traditional bottle of sake, and they drink together in silence as sunlight streams in around the curtains. As long as they stay put, the single price should suffice. But Yuuko finds herself toying with thoughts of a more continuous price, in place until Himawari's unspoken wish comes to pass.
"What are you looking for?" she asks, though she is fairly certain she knows the answer.
But Himawari merely mimicks one of Yuuko's own mysterious, wry expressions. "Something I'm fairly certain doesn't exist," she says. "I'm so scared that I'll kill him one day, though."
Yuuko nods sagely. "If he has managed to survive thus far," she replies, "I think it likely that he will continue to do so.")
--
It was Watanuki's idea to leave the country altogether, and not Yuuko's. He did not ask what she thought, and she in turn understood that this was what he chose to do, what he needed to do to find his own place in the world. He needed to show to the world and himself that he was more than a replacement of someone real, more than a placeholder. He needed to find that definition he had lost in a wish he had made far too hastily, that had both saved him before and left him lost now. So when he told her, I'm leaving, she only smiled.
"I wish for you the best of fortune," she murmured as he left her shop, one last time.
--
("Do you think he'll ever return?" Himawari asks wistfully. "I can't see him from here."
"There is to be no telling where he will go," Yuuko says. "Only that there are some ties that cannot be snapped on merely a whim.")
--
A few months after Watanuki's departure, Doumeki turned up at the shop, not exactly disheveled but at something of a loss. He turned away the offer of refreshments as Yuuko had suspected he would, and stares her down with the same force of will that has been the saving of Watanuki so often. "You knew," he said simply, "that this would happen."
"I suspected," Yuuko admitted. "It was a likely side effect of the shared eye, and your constant exposure to his spiritual encounters. But in the end, whether you would retain the ability was uncertain."
"I can't see those things all the time," Doumeki told her.
Yuuko nodded. "Unfortunately, since Watanuki has lost his own ability, yours will not continue to develop. Eventually, however, he will need you and those skills once more." She eyed him, resigned to what she asked of this boy who never once had troubled her with frivolities. It was not fair, she thought then, that he should continue to pay the price for being the only one willing to take the job. In a just world, he ought to be finding some sort of recompense.
"I'll need to see them all the time," he realised.
Nodding once more, Yuuko told him, "But there is the matter of price."
Doumeki's face as ever did not change much, but Yuuko had learned long ago how to read people like him. She could feel the resignation, the sense of wry recognition, and the perpetuation of a decision made long ago. Oh yes, she could read Doumeki easily - but that didn't precisely make this thing that she had to do any easier. "I'll pay it," he said, as ever.
"Then this is your price," Yuuko said, filling her words with the weight of unpleasant choices so that Doumeki would know precisely what he would pay. "You will wait here, and you will use your own abilities to help others - any others - until you have earned these new ones."
"When will that be?" Doumeki asked.
"You alone will know," Yuuko told him.
He nodded once, and did not thank her, for he understood as well what this would mean for him. They would never exchange words again, but the steady, resolute set of his shoulders as he left the shop forever would haunt Yuuko for a long time to come.
--
(Eventually they do move, dress and sit outside on the veranda. Maru and Moro bring more drinks, and Himawari drinks lightly but often, smiling more than she had previously, and with an air of carelessness she never once had possessed before. "I feel like anything could go well right now," she says, gazing up at the bright blue sky.
"That's a very powerful spell," Yuuko comments lazily. More powerful than anyone could have known, she adds to herself. Except Clow. But Clow was wrong about many other things, and Yuuko relishes in the living that might have died, the love that had not been expected, and Himawari's bright green eyes and shoulders that relaxed to a touch she never could have felt otherwise.
"Watanuki's parents," Himawari says, slowly, "the real ones. They told me that at the last.")
--
An unlikely duo had shown up to the shop one morning only shortly after the resolution of all pertinent troubles: Daidouji Tomoyo and Clow's creation Yue. Tomoyo had come to deliver a price, but once paid she remained, perhaps as moral support for her less-human companion.
"Yuuko-san," Yue said, haltingly, "I have a wish."
"Where is Cerberus?" Yuuko asked, because she had an inkling of the nature of Yue's wish, and she wasn't sure she really wanted to grant it. Once voiced, of course, she had no choice. She wondered if the laws of hitsuzen would allow for pretended ignorance. Hitsuzen was a funny thing like that, after all…
Tomoyo bowed her head and answered when Yue would not. "He didn't make it, Ichihara-san," she said sadly. "The end, when Sakura used up the power in the cards. He fed himself in, somehow… and died with his master."
Nodding, Yuuko responded only with a wise "I see" as she processed this. She had known there were casualties, but the aftermath had left every survivor reeling, and she had been busy seeing to Watanuki and sending the two remaining, broken travellers out into the ether once more. And so the knowledge of the exact identities of those who had died had eluded her. Until now, she supposed, and wondered if Clow had put in a thought for how his staunch servants would feel after the fact. The loss of one master had shaken them both to the core. The loss of a second…
"I want you to separate me from Tsukishiro," Yue said, violet eyes hard, unforgiving. Yuuko knew she was receiving the blame Clow deserved, but she took it in lieu of the blame she would not be receiving from others who had far more right to cast it. "I want you to take whatever price you need to take to separate me from him."
"And what good would that do?" Yuuko asked, letting the enigmatic shopkeeper façade go forgotten for now. "You know very well what the price will be."
"Yuuko-san, I'm dying!" Yue snapped. "I'm dying because my Master can't support me. I'm dying because my Master is dead and the cards are gone, and I don't want to take him with me!"
Tomoyo rested a tentative hand on Yuuko's arm. "Ichihara-san… it's not an easy favour to ask, but think of Touya-san. He just lost his sister and he has already lost his parents. He doesn't need to lose the only other constant in his life."
I know that, Yuuko wanted to shout; all gods damn it, I know! She thought of all the blunders she had made, and how Clow seemed to think she would be perfect for this job, but she wasn't then, she wasn't now, and she didn't want to see another death at her hands. So selfishly she would doom two people to slow death by her inaction.
"What about you?" she asked Tomoyo. "What do you have left?"
Tomoyo did not look lost, but rather as if she knew exactly where she was - and wouldn't wish it on anyone else in the world. Yuuko wished wholeheartedly that she didn't know exactly how that felt. And that must have been why Tomoyo came - to do the reasoning, the appeal to Yuuko's sensibilities. Yue would have shouted, and Yuuko never found his shouting particularly distressing.
"Hope," Tomoyo said softly. "For the ones who were left behind."
Yuuko bowed her head. "I will grant that wish," she murmured, and through her eyelashes she saw Yue's bitter smile.
--
(Himawari rests her head on Yuuko's lap and dreams into the night, because a price paid will last as long as it needs to. Yuuko wonders how it is that there is still one left standing now, because she knew a well long time ago that with great power comes great solitude. But she doesn't object, selfish as she may be, for this brief respite. When Himawari wakes up she will leave, but Yuuko knows how this story will play out. It will not be difficult for Himawari to return, not while she wishes for so much she knows is unattainable, and that little bit that she might find after all.
Maru and Moro are resting inside the shop, and the moon drifts lethargically in the sky above. Yuuko watches the sky from below, or perhaps above, tracing the stars like dots along a story and remember those who went before. She thinks that she is selfish, selfish, for wishing this life upon another.
But Himawari claims to want this too, and this is now, so Yuuko lets herself make the same mistake once more.)
Author: Iambic
Recipient: measuringlife
Series: xxxHOLiC, Tokyo Babylon, Cardcaptor Sakura, mentions Tsubasa
Characters/Pairing: Yuuko, Clow, Himawari, Hokuto, Watanuki, Doumeki, Tomoyo, Yue; Yuuko/Clow, Yuuko/Himawari
Rating: PG
Author's notes/warnings: Spoilers for recent Holic/TRC, though not for major TRC plot points.
She watches them all from her position above, or perhaps below. All those children, tangled up in fate, she observes. Sometimes she can untwist them before the knots steal their breath, and sometimes she tugs their lifeless bodies from the choking fetters of the inevitable. She sees their faces in the liquor she drinks, in the smoke she exhales, in the very dust in the air. And the storeroom, ever expanding to hold all the prices paid, waiting until they return from elsewhere to reclaim what is theirs - for a price.
Once she lived as they do, blindly shoving through life as if through a great forest of bamboo, heedless of the branches until they snapped back in her face. Clow saw that when he saw her power, and the infuriating man predicted exactly how her life would be now.
"Yuuko-san," he would say, using her pseudonym in jest, "the day will come when you understand these customers of yours all too well." Then he would sip his sake and smile kindly at her, and she would sometimes fail to suppress the urge to slap him.
She liked to tease him, taunt him with what he didn't have because it was one thing she could hold over him. Perhaps she could have granted that wish for him, had he deigned to ask it. But her prices as ever matched the value of the wish granted, and Clow's wishes were never small. He was a man who could see the future knew the true significance of his wishes, and so she priced accordingly. If she always dressed her best, and served him the best sake she had, well, an esteemed customer deserved such marks of respect. And if they both went away unsatisfied after these meetings - well, some things were not meant to be.
"You do know, my dear," he once told her, "there is no cost for the exchange of feelings, even if they are not returned."
"The answer is no," she replied. They both recognised the bluff for what it was.
--
(This is now: wrapped in soft sheets and a girl who doesn't know where else to turn. She came to Yuuko looking for a release, or, as she put it, "I'd like to touch someone without killing them." The same temporal wards that thwarted a wizard's curse served to grant Himawari's wish, though perhaps not in the way it had been intended.
Then again, perhaps so, for the girl did not seem at all fazed before, and she lies comfortably now, pensive perhaps but not uncomfortable. Her hair has a different feel to it than Clow's; it falls in waves and ripples, zig-zagging across Yuuko's skin instead of draping sedately. But Himawari is not that sort of person, too young and earnest and unaware of the future. Instead of Clow's languorous elegance, she has a vitality about her that captivates Yuuko in an entirely different way.
"I wonder, Yuuko-san," Himawari asks idly, "do you go looking for the cursed, or do they simply manage to find you?")
--
"If you do this," Yuuko warned the girl standing before her, determination incarnate, "you will die."
"And if I do not," Hokuto countered, "my brother will never live again."
"The Sakurazuka will kill him anyway," Yuuko said. "And should the spell work, its effect would utterly devastate Subaru. It is not an easy thing, to see a beloved friend die before your eyes - even if this friend has ripped away all you find true or happy."
Hokuto looked down. "It's more important that he has a chance," she said quietly. "I want him to find a measure of the happiness that I've been lucky enough to know."
"The world he lives in does not beget that sort of happiness," Yuuko warned. "You made that for yourself, for your power is that of hope, and he has none of that now."
But Hokuto smiled her blinding smile. "I think you're wrong about Subaru. He isn't so weak as all that. And besides… happiness takes many forms. He's got enough love for the entire human race, Yuuko-san. All I want to give him is a little of what you call my own power - a little bit of hope."
"Love is a powerful tool," Yuuko replied, and thought of a set of cards, bound in a book protected by the recollection of love now dead and gone. Cerberus should awake soon; what would he think of the world Yuuko now managed? What would anyone think of the great horror and tragedy that their world evaded so slimly? Somewhere, Yuuko knew, there existed a set of twins who had managed to live in relative contentment, because something has to offset the sorrow of these Sumeragi. "A powerful tool," she repeated, "and one he already has a mastery of."
"A very powerful tool," agreed Hokuto. "And in my world, it's set to destroy us, one by one."
--
(Himawari is disinclined to move, which Yuuko finds quite understandable, and so Maru and Moro fetch the traditional bottle of sake, and they drink together in silence as sunlight streams in around the curtains. As long as they stay put, the single price should suffice. But Yuuko finds herself toying with thoughts of a more continuous price, in place until Himawari's unspoken wish comes to pass.
"What are you looking for?" she asks, though she is fairly certain she knows the answer.
But Himawari merely mimicks one of Yuuko's own mysterious, wry expressions. "Something I'm fairly certain doesn't exist," she says. "I'm so scared that I'll kill him one day, though."
Yuuko nods sagely. "If he has managed to survive thus far," she replies, "I think it likely that he will continue to do so.")
--
It was Watanuki's idea to leave the country altogether, and not Yuuko's. He did not ask what she thought, and she in turn understood that this was what he chose to do, what he needed to do to find his own place in the world. He needed to show to the world and himself that he was more than a replacement of someone real, more than a placeholder. He needed to find that definition he had lost in a wish he had made far too hastily, that had both saved him before and left him lost now. So when he told her, I'm leaving, she only smiled.
"I wish for you the best of fortune," she murmured as he left her shop, one last time.
--
("Do you think he'll ever return?" Himawari asks wistfully. "I can't see him from here."
"There is to be no telling where he will go," Yuuko says. "Only that there are some ties that cannot be snapped on merely a whim.")
--
A few months after Watanuki's departure, Doumeki turned up at the shop, not exactly disheveled but at something of a loss. He turned away the offer of refreshments as Yuuko had suspected he would, and stares her down with the same force of will that has been the saving of Watanuki so often. "You knew," he said simply, "that this would happen."
"I suspected," Yuuko admitted. "It was a likely side effect of the shared eye, and your constant exposure to his spiritual encounters. But in the end, whether you would retain the ability was uncertain."
"I can't see those things all the time," Doumeki told her.
Yuuko nodded. "Unfortunately, since Watanuki has lost his own ability, yours will not continue to develop. Eventually, however, he will need you and those skills once more." She eyed him, resigned to what she asked of this boy who never once had troubled her with frivolities. It was not fair, she thought then, that he should continue to pay the price for being the only one willing to take the job. In a just world, he ought to be finding some sort of recompense.
"I'll need to see them all the time," he realised.
Nodding once more, Yuuko told him, "But there is the matter of price."
Doumeki's face as ever did not change much, but Yuuko had learned long ago how to read people like him. She could feel the resignation, the sense of wry recognition, and the perpetuation of a decision made long ago. Oh yes, she could read Doumeki easily - but that didn't precisely make this thing that she had to do any easier. "I'll pay it," he said, as ever.
"Then this is your price," Yuuko said, filling her words with the weight of unpleasant choices so that Doumeki would know precisely what he would pay. "You will wait here, and you will use your own abilities to help others - any others - until you have earned these new ones."
"When will that be?" Doumeki asked.
"You alone will know," Yuuko told him.
He nodded once, and did not thank her, for he understood as well what this would mean for him. They would never exchange words again, but the steady, resolute set of his shoulders as he left the shop forever would haunt Yuuko for a long time to come.
--
(Eventually they do move, dress and sit outside on the veranda. Maru and Moro bring more drinks, and Himawari drinks lightly but often, smiling more than she had previously, and with an air of carelessness she never once had possessed before. "I feel like anything could go well right now," she says, gazing up at the bright blue sky.
"That's a very powerful spell," Yuuko comments lazily. More powerful than anyone could have known, she adds to herself. Except Clow. But Clow was wrong about many other things, and Yuuko relishes in the living that might have died, the love that had not been expected, and Himawari's bright green eyes and shoulders that relaxed to a touch she never could have felt otherwise.
"Watanuki's parents," Himawari says, slowly, "the real ones. They told me that at the last.")
--
An unlikely duo had shown up to the shop one morning only shortly after the resolution of all pertinent troubles: Daidouji Tomoyo and Clow's creation Yue. Tomoyo had come to deliver a price, but once paid she remained, perhaps as moral support for her less-human companion.
"Yuuko-san," Yue said, haltingly, "I have a wish."
"Where is Cerberus?" Yuuko asked, because she had an inkling of the nature of Yue's wish, and she wasn't sure she really wanted to grant it. Once voiced, of course, she had no choice. She wondered if the laws of hitsuzen would allow for pretended ignorance. Hitsuzen was a funny thing like that, after all…
Tomoyo bowed her head and answered when Yue would not. "He didn't make it, Ichihara-san," she said sadly. "The end, when Sakura used up the power in the cards. He fed himself in, somehow… and died with his master."
Nodding, Yuuko responded only with a wise "I see" as she processed this. She had known there were casualties, but the aftermath had left every survivor reeling, and she had been busy seeing to Watanuki and sending the two remaining, broken travellers out into the ether once more. And so the knowledge of the exact identities of those who had died had eluded her. Until now, she supposed, and wondered if Clow had put in a thought for how his staunch servants would feel after the fact. The loss of one master had shaken them both to the core. The loss of a second…
"I want you to separate me from Tsukishiro," Yue said, violet eyes hard, unforgiving. Yuuko knew she was receiving the blame Clow deserved, but she took it in lieu of the blame she would not be receiving from others who had far more right to cast it. "I want you to take whatever price you need to take to separate me from him."
"And what good would that do?" Yuuko asked, letting the enigmatic shopkeeper façade go forgotten for now. "You know very well what the price will be."
"Yuuko-san, I'm dying!" Yue snapped. "I'm dying because my Master can't support me. I'm dying because my Master is dead and the cards are gone, and I don't want to take him with me!"
Tomoyo rested a tentative hand on Yuuko's arm. "Ichihara-san… it's not an easy favour to ask, but think of Touya-san. He just lost his sister and he has already lost his parents. He doesn't need to lose the only other constant in his life."
I know that, Yuuko wanted to shout; all gods damn it, I know! She thought of all the blunders she had made, and how Clow seemed to think she would be perfect for this job, but she wasn't then, she wasn't now, and she didn't want to see another death at her hands. So selfishly she would doom two people to slow death by her inaction.
"What about you?" she asked Tomoyo. "What do you have left?"
Tomoyo did not look lost, but rather as if she knew exactly where she was - and wouldn't wish it on anyone else in the world. Yuuko wished wholeheartedly that she didn't know exactly how that felt. And that must have been why Tomoyo came - to do the reasoning, the appeal to Yuuko's sensibilities. Yue would have shouted, and Yuuko never found his shouting particularly distressing.
"Hope," Tomoyo said softly. "For the ones who were left behind."
Yuuko bowed her head. "I will grant that wish," she murmured, and through her eyelashes she saw Yue's bitter smile.
--
(Himawari rests her head on Yuuko's lap and dreams into the night, because a price paid will last as long as it needs to. Yuuko wonders how it is that there is still one left standing now, because she knew a well long time ago that with great power comes great solitude. But she doesn't object, selfish as she may be, for this brief respite. When Himawari wakes up she will leave, but Yuuko knows how this story will play out. It will not be difficult for Himawari to return, not while she wishes for so much she knows is unattainable, and that little bit that she might find after all.
Maru and Moro are resting inside the shop, and the moon drifts lethargically in the sky above. Yuuko watches the sky from below, or perhaps above, tracing the stars like dots along a story and remember those who went before. She thinks that she is selfish, selfish, for wishing this life upon another.
But Himawari claims to want this too, and this is now, so Yuuko lets herself make the same mistake once more.)