Fic: Trope Bingo 4, xxxHolic Rou
This story made me insane. I thought when I was done, it would be amusing to describe how the thing came about. But at the moment, it doesn't seem amusing at all. I just want it gone from my head.
Oh, and there is nothing whatsoever happy about this.
Title: The Footnote At the Last Closing Door (Trope Bingo 4)
xxxHolic Rou
Kunogi Himawari, Doumeki Shizuka
Rated for General Audiences (who don't mind having their brain cracked in half)
[Trope: Accidental Stimulation}
The Footnote At the Last Closing Door
"There's a hole in my neighbourhood, down which
of late, I cannot help but fall." (Elbow, "Grounds For Divorce")
This is not exactly the story of What Came After. When Watanuki Kimihiro went into the wish-granting shop and never came out again. When his name and transcripts vanished from the school enrollment. When his belongings and history evaporated like fog, from that tidy, tiny little flat. When his voice and his smile trickled ever-so-quietly from the memories of his acquaintances.
There are enough people left who remember Watanuki, to keep track of him. People who see what happens going forward, who see what he becomes, and can carry the story on and on, as Watanuki himself goes on and on.
But behind that story, there is another. Tucked away in the lingering invisible fringes of the space Watanuki left in the everyday world. It is a story almost no one knows, because the parties involved will never tell, never save even the merest breath of it. When they move on, they will leave it behind to weather, just like the scraps of prayers left out at some nameless, dusty roadside shrine.
Not one other soul will ever know, and one day it will be less than anonymous dust, lost forever in a scatter on some errant breeze.
This could be that story.
It begins with an ending. A mild hazy afternoon, and Himawari smiling because it's the only defense she has left, and Doumeki says, "Don't."
He's been looking hard at some point past her shoulder, and his eyes are dark amber pits she could fall into and have the flesh scorched off her bones. Possibly because she's just said something too harmless, something he wouldn't have to hear if he didn't want to. It feels like she's the only person on the planet who can see how, even though he's still breathing and walking around, he is dismantled, utterly, and she wants.....
Well, perhaps she just doesn't want to be alone.
She doesn't know how to look the way he does, even if she feels it through to her marrow, exactly the same, as if their hearts had been wrenched out and stuffed in the same cramped box, still slick and throbbing against each other.
So she says, "It's nice, isn't it? That the weather cleared up in time for P.E."
And that's when Doumeki says, "Don't." A boulder dropped on a gravel bed. "Not with me."
His words ought to feel like a slap across the face, but they don't. Himawari finds she can let her smile drain away, without effort. The next breath she takes is less difficult, somehow. Watanuki has been gone for two weeks, and no one around them has noticed. As far as anyone else is concerned, he was never even here. Just like one of those late-night TV tales of the strange and supernatural, except that it's true, it happened right in front of her, and there was nothing anyone could do, and there will never be any end to it.
Which is why she says to Doumeki then, not a trace of a smile anymore, "If we sit together at lunch, we won't have to talk to anyone."
They don't sit together that day; she has no idea what he does. But that must be where it starts. Or where it ends: what they used to be.
Not long after, it's a Saturday, and Doumeki walks her to her piano lesson. Or rather, she is walking to her piano lesson and he wanders alongside her, to no evident purpose. She wonders if he will speak, but he doesn't. She wonders why he is choosing to walk twenty minutes completely out of his way, and then wonders if it was even a choice at all.
They reach the walkway of her teacher's house, and she waits there in case he wants to say something. But then all he does is look up from the pavement, to the strap of her satchel, hanging from her shoulder.
"Would you like to wait inside?" she asks, in hopes of prompting anything out of him.
Ever so slightly he shifts his weight, and for just a blink of an instant she pictures a wind chime, lying slack and jumbled on a table. Glass and strands of filament, tangled in silence.
He doesn't answer, doesn't move, and since pleasantries are no good between them, she tries addressing those tangled pieces, instead. "If people knew the truth about the world. What it really is. Everything would stop."
It's something she's known as long as she's understood herself. What she is, what she can do to any stranger she touches, at any time. And as she'd grown up, seeing more of life, and all the calamity and violence and heartbreak that erupts every day, all over the world, for no reason, she has come to understand that it isn't so much that she carries a curse.
What she spreads around, is just the truth. That life, is in actuality a hazardous, deadly condition.
It's a truth people generally aren't supposed to know. Because if they all knew it, if they understood it the way she does, they would give up the effort of living altogether. Which is why she has never, ever spoken this way to another soul.
Doumeki, she suspects, is an exception. Maybe because he knows that truth already, and out of sheer spite is still walking around regardless. Maybe because he is at this moment living through a loss very few people in the world would even believe, let alone comprehend. Just like her.
"Once you've come to see what's possible," he answers slowly, looking off down the road now. "You can never go back to a time when you didn't see."
And with that, he turns and heads on up the pavement. Turning the corner, then out of sight.
There comes a morning in summer, when she steps out of the shower, feels the bath towel drag across the scars on her back, and is stricken with rage so intense that her gut cramps and her vision clouds, and the next thing she knows she's on her knees on the bathmat, both hands clamped over her mouth to keep the scream inside.
How dare he disappear after what she'd sacrificed, the selfishness, it was monstrous. Because of him, she was untouchable. Ruined. A horror under her clothes and now no one, no one would ever be able to comprehend why. The reason had ceased to be, the person who gave those scars meaning had erased himself from the world, it was all for nothing, every shameful day for the rest of her life was for nothing. How could he possibly have done this to her? What kind of person could just abandon someone they'd disfigured this way, without a word or even a second thought?
Watanuki, you wretched liar, she thinks, gagging on the tears. I'm still crying over you.
Eventually she calms down enough to ponder the fact that even now, even knowing better, she would take those scars all over again for him. Because he was Watanuki. Extraordinary and devastating, and unique in all creation. Even after she'd nearly killed him, he'd never pushed her away, and no matter how furious she may be, no matter how long this hurts, she will love him until she ends.
It's just truth. It's inescapable.
She doesn't think she can bear having to smile at anyone that day, so she tracks down Doumeki, who is dragging a broom across the clean walkways of his family's temple.
"Can I show you something?" she ventures.
When he looks up, actually looks into her eyes for the first time in quite a long while, she realizes why he hasn't in so long. It's like looking on some winged creature trapped in amber for a million years, unable to die, unable to move, unable to even sleep.
It isn't up to her to try and free him. There isn't a thing on earth she could do to make it one bit easier on him. It isn't her place, it isn't what she's for, and it wouldn't work anyway.
Instead, she leads Doumeki across town to a park she knows; a narrow block of unkempt trees and cracked sidewalks, in a dilapidated neighborhood. They perch in a shaded spot, on a picnic table layered in grime and graffiti, and she nods her chin toward a ramshackle basketball court, where a motley group of boys practice stunts on their skateboards.
"I used to come here all the time," she offers. And then folds her hands around her knees, and watches the boys jumping, and flipping their decks, sometimes dragging around a crude plywood ramp they must have made.
After awhile, Doumeki turns to look at her; she can see in the corner of her eye, the question he's aiming at the side of her head.
Some of the boys wear helmets, some knee and elbow pads. But there are enough dressed only in t-shirts, and worn baggy shorts, sailing up and off that splintered bockety ramp.
"Sometimes they fall," she tells Doumeki. "They get injured sometimes. But it's never because of me."
Eventually, one of the boys does take a spill. His skateboard goes clattering sideways and he hits the court pavement like a fat sack of rice. It knocks the wind from him in a choked cry that catches in Himawari's throat, and everyone jerks to a standstill, turning toward the stunned, fallen boy, and Himawari couldn't tear her eyes away if her life depended on it.
But she hears, when Doumeki's comprehension sinks in, on his slow drawn-in breath. He isn't watching the court, he's watching her. The thing she brought him here to see.
There is a late afternoon storm that shreds branches off trees and tosses them down the streets, and bruises the sky to wintry indigo. It blows Doumeki in on a squall on her front porch, gleaming pale with inky strands of hair punctuating his forehead and one sharp cheekbone.
The set of his shoulders and spine are rigid, like he hasn't yet stopped pushing forward against the gale, so she leads him to her room, and then goes to make a large pot of very hot tea.
The odd thing, is that when she comes back to find him seated in her desk chair, it doesn't seem odd at all. No one save her parents has ever joined her in this room. But there's no mystery, here. No anticipation of something new. She just gives him a towel to stop him dripping, and pours out the tea.
The storm groans against the eaves and Himawari gazes through the wet-spattered window at the trees, bending and shivering. Doumeki has found one of her hair ribbons on her desk, and wrapped it around his hand, binding the knuckles, leaving a long trailing end that doesn't quite reach the rug.
When the clouds finally snuff what's left of the day, leaving the room a box of blurred shadows and stillness, she hears him ask, "The scars. Do they ever hurt?"
And she has to think, carefully. One, because knowing Watanuki and Doumeki has reconstructed her entire concept of pain from the ground up. And two because, what is it he really wants to know?
"It used to feel like something was ripping me away from everything. In pieces," she eventually says. "But that's just. It's what would've happened to him. The hurt wasn't the bad part."
It was the sideslip moments of terrifying dislocation, the helplessness, being clawed away to nothing by a force she couldn't see or hear, only feel. And then realizing that none of those feelings were properly hers; she had taken them on, that was all. Which in some respects made it better, and in others made it so much worse.
"You have the proof. That he used to be here." The proof. The only proof, his flat gravelly intonation informs her. Along with the implication that if said evidence were to be mislaid or ever forgotten, he might not be responsible for his actions.
"And you get the proof he still exists," she replies in kind.
Had she been someone less hypervigilant about what she touched. Had Doumeki been something other than the unswerving axis of his own cosmos. They might have stumbled into a way of surviving together, then. They might have sought warmth, the reassurance of something to hold onto, the security of companionship after the apocalypse. Even if it was only an illusion.
That is something people do. She knows about calamity and the reflexes of being human; she's been watching it from ground zero all her life.
But she and Doumeki are not people. Not in any way that counts, now. And so what they do is survive, and occasionally wander into each others' proximity and extrapolate definitions of survival, from the shape of the space and the texture of the silence between them.
Take for example, the sub-freezing day when the sky is so white it hurts her eyes, and the air is like breathing knives and their breath bleeds fog when they stand at an intersection blocked by two smashed cars; buckled steel and glass shattered across the icy road.
Her heart thumps in time to the red blinking traffic light. One driver's face is white and blank as the sky, as he's shepherded off by paramedics. A car engine trickles oil on the pavement. It is harrowing and beautiful and ruined and perfect, and quiet, so quiet that her insides brim and spill over with the ache of recognition.
This is what the world is. This is what she is. Only here, only now, nothing is false. It's all absolutely true.
And when Doumeki drifts away from the scene, she slips into his wake, borrowing his intrinsic stillness to hold the moment unbroken. She cannot determine her own steps and hang onto it, so she lets him draw her along, to wherever he's going.
His room, this time. Where they sit until her hands and feet no longer sting with cold, but still she smells the razor-honed frost and scorched brakes, and the sky glares white behind her eyes.
And Doumeki says, "It's not because of you. It's just because."
She can't speak; if she speaks the spell will break too soon. So she nods. Of course he'd understand.
He's looking at the shadow where her long hair covers her neck. "Can I see?"
The scars aren't something she ever intends to show another person. But they aren't people, not really. He is an axis, and she is a lightning rod, and though their gristly wet human hearts are struggling against the walls of the same little box for space enough to beat, they aren't surviving together. Only in proximity.
And that makes it all right. To unbutton her blouse, let it slip from her shoulders, to the floor. To pull her hair forward over one shoulder. To bow her head, and keep perfectly still for his inspection.
The scars have warped her flesh into thick knots and rivers of tissue, and so all she feels when he eventually decides to touch, is a distant suggestion of pressure. On her shoulders. Along her ribs. Up the knobs of her spine. Pitiless, methodical. Respectful, and yet entirely unsentimental. It's possible he's counting the scars, or mapping them on his mind's eye for later. For the times he doubts his grasp of history. For the times he steps back, and wonders how it all came to this, in whatever future he eventually faces.
Or perhaps he only wants to know, in the way she knows, what the truth about the world feels like. The truth that people aren't supposed to see, and all too often are content to safely forget.
*****
Oh, and there is nothing whatsoever happy about this.
Title: The Footnote At the Last Closing Door (Trope Bingo 4)
xxxHolic Rou
Kunogi Himawari, Doumeki Shizuka
Rated for General Audiences (who don't mind having their brain cracked in half)
[Trope: Accidental Stimulation}
The Footnote At the Last Closing Door
"There's a hole in my neighbourhood, down which
of late, I cannot help but fall." (Elbow, "Grounds For Divorce")
This is not exactly the story of What Came After. When Watanuki Kimihiro went into the wish-granting shop and never came out again. When his name and transcripts vanished from the school enrollment. When his belongings and history evaporated like fog, from that tidy, tiny little flat. When his voice and his smile trickled ever-so-quietly from the memories of his acquaintances.
There are enough people left who remember Watanuki, to keep track of him. People who see what happens going forward, who see what he becomes, and can carry the story on and on, as Watanuki himself goes on and on.
But behind that story, there is another. Tucked away in the lingering invisible fringes of the space Watanuki left in the everyday world. It is a story almost no one knows, because the parties involved will never tell, never save even the merest breath of it. When they move on, they will leave it behind to weather, just like the scraps of prayers left out at some nameless, dusty roadside shrine.
Not one other soul will ever know, and one day it will be less than anonymous dust, lost forever in a scatter on some errant breeze.
This could be that story.
It begins with an ending. A mild hazy afternoon, and Himawari smiling because it's the only defense she has left, and Doumeki says, "Don't."
He's been looking hard at some point past her shoulder, and his eyes are dark amber pits she could fall into and have the flesh scorched off her bones. Possibly because she's just said something too harmless, something he wouldn't have to hear if he didn't want to. It feels like she's the only person on the planet who can see how, even though he's still breathing and walking around, he is dismantled, utterly, and she wants.....
Well, perhaps she just doesn't want to be alone.
She doesn't know how to look the way he does, even if she feels it through to her marrow, exactly the same, as if their hearts had been wrenched out and stuffed in the same cramped box, still slick and throbbing against each other.
So she says, "It's nice, isn't it? That the weather cleared up in time for P.E."
And that's when Doumeki says, "Don't." A boulder dropped on a gravel bed. "Not with me."
His words ought to feel like a slap across the face, but they don't. Himawari finds she can let her smile drain away, without effort. The next breath she takes is less difficult, somehow. Watanuki has been gone for two weeks, and no one around them has noticed. As far as anyone else is concerned, he was never even here. Just like one of those late-night TV tales of the strange and supernatural, except that it's true, it happened right in front of her, and there was nothing anyone could do, and there will never be any end to it.
Which is why she says to Doumeki then, not a trace of a smile anymore, "If we sit together at lunch, we won't have to talk to anyone."
They don't sit together that day; she has no idea what he does. But that must be where it starts. Or where it ends: what they used to be.
Not long after, it's a Saturday, and Doumeki walks her to her piano lesson. Or rather, she is walking to her piano lesson and he wanders alongside her, to no evident purpose. She wonders if he will speak, but he doesn't. She wonders why he is choosing to walk twenty minutes completely out of his way, and then wonders if it was even a choice at all.
They reach the walkway of her teacher's house, and she waits there in case he wants to say something. But then all he does is look up from the pavement, to the strap of her satchel, hanging from her shoulder.
"Would you like to wait inside?" she asks, in hopes of prompting anything out of him.
Ever so slightly he shifts his weight, and for just a blink of an instant she pictures a wind chime, lying slack and jumbled on a table. Glass and strands of filament, tangled in silence.
He doesn't answer, doesn't move, and since pleasantries are no good between them, she tries addressing those tangled pieces, instead. "If people knew the truth about the world. What it really is. Everything would stop."
It's something she's known as long as she's understood herself. What she is, what she can do to any stranger she touches, at any time. And as she'd grown up, seeing more of life, and all the calamity and violence and heartbreak that erupts every day, all over the world, for no reason, she has come to understand that it isn't so much that she carries a curse.
What she spreads around, is just the truth. That life, is in actuality a hazardous, deadly condition.
It's a truth people generally aren't supposed to know. Because if they all knew it, if they understood it the way she does, they would give up the effort of living altogether. Which is why she has never, ever spoken this way to another soul.
Doumeki, she suspects, is an exception. Maybe because he knows that truth already, and out of sheer spite is still walking around regardless. Maybe because he is at this moment living through a loss very few people in the world would even believe, let alone comprehend. Just like her.
"Once you've come to see what's possible," he answers slowly, looking off down the road now. "You can never go back to a time when you didn't see."
And with that, he turns and heads on up the pavement. Turning the corner, then out of sight.
There comes a morning in summer, when she steps out of the shower, feels the bath towel drag across the scars on her back, and is stricken with rage so intense that her gut cramps and her vision clouds, and the next thing she knows she's on her knees on the bathmat, both hands clamped over her mouth to keep the scream inside.
How dare he disappear after what she'd sacrificed, the selfishness, it was monstrous. Because of him, she was untouchable. Ruined. A horror under her clothes and now no one, no one would ever be able to comprehend why. The reason had ceased to be, the person who gave those scars meaning had erased himself from the world, it was all for nothing, every shameful day for the rest of her life was for nothing. How could he possibly have done this to her? What kind of person could just abandon someone they'd disfigured this way, without a word or even a second thought?
Watanuki, you wretched liar, she thinks, gagging on the tears. I'm still crying over you.
Eventually she calms down enough to ponder the fact that even now, even knowing better, she would take those scars all over again for him. Because he was Watanuki. Extraordinary and devastating, and unique in all creation. Even after she'd nearly killed him, he'd never pushed her away, and no matter how furious she may be, no matter how long this hurts, she will love him until she ends.
It's just truth. It's inescapable.
She doesn't think she can bear having to smile at anyone that day, so she tracks down Doumeki, who is dragging a broom across the clean walkways of his family's temple.
"Can I show you something?" she ventures.
When he looks up, actually looks into her eyes for the first time in quite a long while, she realizes why he hasn't in so long. It's like looking on some winged creature trapped in amber for a million years, unable to die, unable to move, unable to even sleep.
It isn't up to her to try and free him. There isn't a thing on earth she could do to make it one bit easier on him. It isn't her place, it isn't what she's for, and it wouldn't work anyway.
Instead, she leads Doumeki across town to a park she knows; a narrow block of unkempt trees and cracked sidewalks, in a dilapidated neighborhood. They perch in a shaded spot, on a picnic table layered in grime and graffiti, and she nods her chin toward a ramshackle basketball court, where a motley group of boys practice stunts on their skateboards.
"I used to come here all the time," she offers. And then folds her hands around her knees, and watches the boys jumping, and flipping their decks, sometimes dragging around a crude plywood ramp they must have made.
After awhile, Doumeki turns to look at her; she can see in the corner of her eye, the question he's aiming at the side of her head.
Some of the boys wear helmets, some knee and elbow pads. But there are enough dressed only in t-shirts, and worn baggy shorts, sailing up and off that splintered bockety ramp.
"Sometimes they fall," she tells Doumeki. "They get injured sometimes. But it's never because of me."
Eventually, one of the boys does take a spill. His skateboard goes clattering sideways and he hits the court pavement like a fat sack of rice. It knocks the wind from him in a choked cry that catches in Himawari's throat, and everyone jerks to a standstill, turning toward the stunned, fallen boy, and Himawari couldn't tear her eyes away if her life depended on it.
But she hears, when Doumeki's comprehension sinks in, on his slow drawn-in breath. He isn't watching the court, he's watching her. The thing she brought him here to see.
There is a late afternoon storm that shreds branches off trees and tosses them down the streets, and bruises the sky to wintry indigo. It blows Doumeki in on a squall on her front porch, gleaming pale with inky strands of hair punctuating his forehead and one sharp cheekbone.
The set of his shoulders and spine are rigid, like he hasn't yet stopped pushing forward against the gale, so she leads him to her room, and then goes to make a large pot of very hot tea.
The odd thing, is that when she comes back to find him seated in her desk chair, it doesn't seem odd at all. No one save her parents has ever joined her in this room. But there's no mystery, here. No anticipation of something new. She just gives him a towel to stop him dripping, and pours out the tea.
The storm groans against the eaves and Himawari gazes through the wet-spattered window at the trees, bending and shivering. Doumeki has found one of her hair ribbons on her desk, and wrapped it around his hand, binding the knuckles, leaving a long trailing end that doesn't quite reach the rug.
When the clouds finally snuff what's left of the day, leaving the room a box of blurred shadows and stillness, she hears him ask, "The scars. Do they ever hurt?"
And she has to think, carefully. One, because knowing Watanuki and Doumeki has reconstructed her entire concept of pain from the ground up. And two because, what is it he really wants to know?
"It used to feel like something was ripping me away from everything. In pieces," she eventually says. "But that's just. It's what would've happened to him. The hurt wasn't the bad part."
It was the sideslip moments of terrifying dislocation, the helplessness, being clawed away to nothing by a force she couldn't see or hear, only feel. And then realizing that none of those feelings were properly hers; she had taken them on, that was all. Which in some respects made it better, and in others made it so much worse.
"You have the proof. That he used to be here." The proof. The only proof, his flat gravelly intonation informs her. Along with the implication that if said evidence were to be mislaid or ever forgotten, he might not be responsible for his actions.
"And you get the proof he still exists," she replies in kind.
Had she been someone less hypervigilant about what she touched. Had Doumeki been something other than the unswerving axis of his own cosmos. They might have stumbled into a way of surviving together, then. They might have sought warmth, the reassurance of something to hold onto, the security of companionship after the apocalypse. Even if it was only an illusion.
That is something people do. She knows about calamity and the reflexes of being human; she's been watching it from ground zero all her life.
But she and Doumeki are not people. Not in any way that counts, now. And so what they do is survive, and occasionally wander into each others' proximity and extrapolate definitions of survival, from the shape of the space and the texture of the silence between them.
Take for example, the sub-freezing day when the sky is so white it hurts her eyes, and the air is like breathing knives and their breath bleeds fog when they stand at an intersection blocked by two smashed cars; buckled steel and glass shattered across the icy road.
Her heart thumps in time to the red blinking traffic light. One driver's face is white and blank as the sky, as he's shepherded off by paramedics. A car engine trickles oil on the pavement. It is harrowing and beautiful and ruined and perfect, and quiet, so quiet that her insides brim and spill over with the ache of recognition.
This is what the world is. This is what she is. Only here, only now, nothing is false. It's all absolutely true.
And when Doumeki drifts away from the scene, she slips into his wake, borrowing his intrinsic stillness to hold the moment unbroken. She cannot determine her own steps and hang onto it, so she lets him draw her along, to wherever he's going.
His room, this time. Where they sit until her hands and feet no longer sting with cold, but still she smells the razor-honed frost and scorched brakes, and the sky glares white behind her eyes.
And Doumeki says, "It's not because of you. It's just because."
She can't speak; if she speaks the spell will break too soon. So she nods. Of course he'd understand.
He's looking at the shadow where her long hair covers her neck. "Can I see?"
The scars aren't something she ever intends to show another person. But they aren't people, not really. He is an axis, and she is a lightning rod, and though their gristly wet human hearts are struggling against the walls of the same little box for space enough to beat, they aren't surviving together. Only in proximity.
And that makes it all right. To unbutton her blouse, let it slip from her shoulders, to the floor. To pull her hair forward over one shoulder. To bow her head, and keep perfectly still for his inspection.
The scars have warped her flesh into thick knots and rivers of tissue, and so all she feels when he eventually decides to touch, is a distant suggestion of pressure. On her shoulders. Along her ribs. Up the knobs of her spine. Pitiless, methodical. Respectful, and yet entirely unsentimental. It's possible he's counting the scars, or mapping them on his mind's eye for later. For the times he doubts his grasp of history. For the times he steps back, and wonders how it all came to this, in whatever future he eventually faces.
Or perhaps he only wants to know, in the way she knows, what the truth about the world feels like. The truth that people aren't supposed to see, and all too often are content to safely forget.
*****