profile meme, ooc
[Character Name] Watanuki Kimihiro
[Canon] xXxHolic
[Point Taken from Canon] Chapter 143
[Age] 16
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] ...we'll go with bisexual, but mostly uninterested.
[Eye Color] Left bright blue, right gold--see icon!
[Hair Color] Black
[Height] we'll say approx. 5'6"-5'7"? taller than the Japanese average, but not by much.
[Other] n/a for now. He looks pretty average. Kind of guy you'd miss if you weren't looking hard enough. Unless he's flailing.
[Clothing] He wears his school uniform, though if it's hot out he'll take off the jacket. When he's cooking and cleaning, he dons his waifu uniform.
[Background] Kimihiro Watanuki was created when Syaoran Li gave up fourteen years of his life to Yuuko Ichihara, the Dimension Witch; seven of those years went towards the possibility of rescuing his beloved Princess Sakura, and seven more towards assurance of Watanuki’s survival. Later, to allow Syaoran to rejoin the rest of the Tsubasa group after seven years of captivity, Watanuki gave up the entirety of his memories, from his home to his friends, to his parents’ names. That is how we find him at the beginning to xxxholic, living on his own and tormented by spirits. Drawn by his blood, made rich and sweet by the impossibility of his existence, they chase him relentlessly, until one day, he comes upon an odd little shop.
Within its doors, which he enters seemingly against his own better judgement, he meets the owner of the establishment, a certain Yuuko Ichihara, wish granter extraordinaire, and her two little helpers, Maru and Moro. In exchange for his service in her shop, she promises to cure him of his plague of spirits. Little does Watanuki know, his troubles have only begun. In fact, the first client Yuuko deals with--a woman whose lying habit manifests by causing her body to seize up--meets an unfortunate end when, unable to let go of her habit, she freezes in front of oncoming traffic. The second customer is no better; a woman whose internet addiction does not allow her a fulfilling life. This time Yuuko asks Watanuki to come with her to the customer’s home, lugging around a baseball bat. The witch’s methods of dealing with this problem are more proactive: the aluminium bat is baptized Zantetsuken (‘The Sword That Cuts Iron’) and, thanks to the power of names, is temporarily given the properties of a sword. It slices through the offending laptop like butter, and Yuuko happily collects a child’s high chair for her trouble. Incidentally, Watanuki gets to carry both the chair and the bat home.
Some time after these events, Yuuko receives a more formal visit. During a sun shower, she allows Watanuki to do a simple mirror divination, amplified by the combined power of sun and rain. He hears a sentence carried on the wind: “we’re coming, be ready to welcome us.” It’s all the warning he gets before the sky breaks open like an egg, releasing four mismatched people into the shop’s courtyard. One black-clad warrior, a white-clad mage, and a young man holding a comatose princess. Yuuko cannot help them, but she gives them the means to help themselves: Maru and Moro drag Watanuki into the shop’s vast treasure room, to fetch two funny-looking creatures. They’re called Mokonas; the white one will allow the four travellers to cross dimensions, and the black one will stay at the shop to serve as an intermediary. After collecting her price, Yuuko sends them on their way, and life, for the most part, goes back to ‘normal’ at the shop.
Yuuko’s next excursion with Watanuki is to demonstrate the difference between a proper diviner and a fake; in her line of work, of course, this is basic knowledge. After taking him to an impressive-looking but ultimately vague and content-shabby fortune teller, she leads him to the humble home of an old woman, both a good friend and professional contact. The old lady not only accurately predicts Watanuki’s name and birthdate, she seems to know the intimate details of his life without so much as a whisper of too much information. Impressed, Watanuki gladly accepts to cook her a royal feast in exchange.
During this time, the readers are properly introduced to Watanuki’s two best friends (well, one crush and one archrival, but let’s not get technical): Himawari Kunogi and Shizuka Doumeki. The bubbly and lively Himawari is Watanuki’s dream girl, but Yuuko’s first assessment of her is inauspicious: “she’s anything but your guardian angel.” On the other hand, the taciturn, athletic and popular Doumeki, captain of the archery club, who comes from a line of Buddhist priests, serves as a foil for Watanuki’s much more outspoken character. (It doesn’t help that he gets all the girls, either.) On a balmy summer evening, Yuuko organizes a Hyaku-Monotagari (lit. ‘One Hundred Tales’, where participants must tell 100 ghost stories to summon spirits) at Doumeki’s family’s temple. The evening goes as planned, except that, due to Watanuki’s attractiveness to spirits, the gang manages to summon a bunch of rather nasty houseguests. Luckily, Doumeki is imbued with a pure aura, allowing him to use his ki, or spirit energy, to ward off the monsters. Much to Watanuki’s chagrin, it would seem that hanging out with Doumeki is the only thing to do.
As expected, Watanuki and Doumeki soon begin to get sent on Yuuko’s missions together: the very first of these is the Angel-san case, where a kind of Ouija-like game has become rampantly popular in a local high school. Almost too much, as negative energy has begun to build. The two boys are dispatched on the scene, where they manage, just barely, to destroy the powerful spirit with all their limbs intact. Unfortunately, Doumeki breaks an arm, starting a chain of debts towards him that Watanuki must repay. Clearly, there’s no getting rid of this guy…
Yuuko also meets a new client, a woman who spots the Monkey’s Paw (based on the horror story by W. W. Jacobs of the same name) while the contents of the treasure room are out for yearly cleaning. She convinces Yuuko to sell it to her for a promise: never open it. It ended in sorrow; these types of things usually do.
On a more cheerful note, Watanuki makes a new friend: he meets a stalwart, honest fox merchant, proprietor of a supernatural oden (a kind of Japanese stew) stand. He gives the fox’s son one of Doumeki’s broken arrows, and wins the little cub’s eternal admiration, and a free meal. Apparently, foxes make excellent fried tofu.
The days are getting colder and Valentine’s day is around the corner. Watanuki makes a delicious chocolate fondant for Himawari; sadly, Doumeki eats it. Unluckily for him, because a Zashiki-Warashi (a lucky spirit) has taken a shine to someone and is desperately searching for a gift to give him! So she does the obvious thing, which is to steal the fondant--or its spiritual essence--right out of Doumeki’s body, taking his soul in the process. Now Watanuki has to find her, and retrieve Doumeki’s soul, before the clock strikes midnight. (I’d make a Cinderella reference, but you can fill in the blanks.) He confronts the Zashiki-Warashi with surprising results: she’s taken a shine to him! So he gets the soul and the fondant back, as well as a new admirer. That Watanuki, pretty popular with the ghost girls.
Watanuki gets the opportunity to interact with two more clients, twins who clearly haven’t read The Secret don’t understand the unfortunate power of negative thinking, and the strength of words. We are also allowed a glimpse into Watanuki’s past, confirming that he was in fact a socially inept child whose friends were mostly dead people. I’ve seen this in a movie before.
Things take a turn for the dramatic, however, when the shop receives a visit from the Ame-Warashi, or Rain Fairy. She needs Yuuko’s help: a friend of hers is in trouble. Needless to say, Watanuki and Doumeki are sent out. The problem area seems to be a huge hydrangea whose flowers are blooming an uncharacteristic blood red. Watanuki soon gets to the ‘root’ of the problem: the corpse of a murdered child was buried beneath the tree, and the tree was killing itself to keep her from entering Hell. Thanks to Watanuki, the tree can live again and the little girl gets closure. As compensation, the Ame-Warashi gives them a Pipe Fox, or kuda-kitsune, and the furry, snakelike creature quickly takes a shine to the put-upon errand boy.
For White Day (a month after Valentine’s, in Japan, where people who received chocolates on V-day get to return the favour), Watanuki visits the Zashiki-Warashi in her mountainous domain, with a pretty pair of hair clips; no chocolates, since he wasn’t sure when or if he’d be able to see her. She seems quite pleased by his offering anyways. Some time afterwards, Watanuki gets to participate in a demon parade (maybe not a great idea, but it was on Yuuko’s orders) and gets saved from becoming a snack by the cute little oden fox.
While Yuuko’s away, the errand boy will play. Or nearly get killed. Something like that. While Yuuko’s out doing something important (apparently, creating a god), Watanuki makes friends with a mysterious woman. They meet in the park and take an immediate liking to each other; she clearly sees a long-lost child in him, and he sees in her the mother he can’t remember. It quickly becomes apparent that spending time with her is taxing: Watanuki is becoming sick. Very sick. Sick to the point that increased exposure to this woman will kill him. But she’s so sad, and kind, and gentle--and Watanuki’s such a bleeding heart--that he can’t stop. So Doumeki, furious with worry, takes things into his own hands: he destroys the spirit woman, allowing Watanuki to heal. Watanuki learns a powerful lesson: we can only choose to accept or reject the decisions of others, but never control them. It takes some time, but Doumeki is eventually forgiven, and the two boys go back to their bickering.
Doumeki gets into even more trouble when he breaks Watanuki free from a spider’s web, destroying the web and gaining the spider’s ire in the process. The spider curses his right eye; feeling guilty for indirectly being the cause of Doumeki’s suffering, Watanuki exchanges his own right eye. Doumeki can now shoot arrows again, but he’s furious at what he sees as his friend’s unnecessary sacrifice. The boys search in vain for a cure in the Doumeki family archives, when a book worm comes out of a book they borrowed from Himawari and devours every last speck of useful information. They’re screwed now.
Watanuki begins to have hallucinations in the space where his right eye used to be; a pond, a field--apparently, the spirit world is fighting for the right to his eye, because he’s a Special Snowflake and his eye is a powerful magical artefact. The zashiki-Warashi is captured trying to rescue the eye and Watanuki desperately tries to save her from the clutches of the Spider Queen. While he does manage to save the girl, he ultimately loses the eye. Luckily, he’s got good friends, and he and Doumeki now share a right eye.
So it’s the new year (it went from March to the New Year’s, I don’t know, don’t ask me) and Watanuki’s first dream, meant to be symbolic, is of an eggplant. A huge eggplant, even! This actually a good thing because apparently the top three things to dream about are Mount Fuji, Eagles, and Eggplants. Oh, Japan. Watanuki’s luck is still crap, because he accidentally manages to buy Himawari’s nightmare; he offers her cookies right after hearing her recount the story. Luckily, Himawari passed the cookies on to Doumeki, who ate them and thereby gave him his own dream, of his archer grandfather on a proud horse. This results in a really bizarre dream in which Watanuki nearly gets eaten by a monster, but gets saved by prince charming a Doumeki look-alike on a noble steed. Yeah. He does get something out of the ordeal: a lovely golden arrow used to chase away the demon.
Watanuki and Yuuko meet up with the dream-seller, an anteater-looking creature in a beret, who is very interested in the arrow. Yuuko strikes up a bargain: five happy dreams in exchange for the arrow! The transaction takes place, and the pair receive five balloon-shaped dreams. Two of these go to Yuuko and Watanuki keeps three. The first he gives to the little oden fox for having saved him at the demon parade; the second is a lovely dream wherein he meets Haruka Doumeki, Shizuka’s grandfather, which results in some stupendous blackmail material. The third he saves for later. The next day he meets a young medium named Kohane and her neurotic, abusive mother. Together he and Kohane transfer the spirit of a haunted cherry tree to another, healthier tree in Doumeki’s temple, and give her a send-off with a happy game of mah-jong.
After a few more run-ins, namely with a cat-girl and his first real sighting of a corpse, Watanuki has another dream featuring Haruka-san. They talk about Doumeki and girls, and Haruka advises him to bring the third lucky dream to school the next day. On the way, however, Watanuki meets up with Kohane and gives her the dream instead. Bad idea. In the school hallways, he meets Himawari; she pats him on the back as a greeting, but when he leans against the window during their conversation, the pane pops open and he tumbles out. From the second floor.
He wakes up, covered head-to-toe in bandages, in the shop. His survival is covered by the combined efforts of Syaoran, Doumeki, Himawari and Haruka. Himawari feels the need to come clean, however: she’s got some bad mojo. She brings back luck, and it’s interacting with her that’s causing Watanuki all this pain. Luckily for her, Watanuki takes this all in stride, reaffirming what a good friend she is and how she brings joy to each of his days. Awwww.
Things start to get more normal again afterwards: Yuuko deals with a case involving a ghost girl who mistakenly thought the living members of her household were the ghosts, and Watanuki gets a meal of oden from the little fox and makes him some mitts in exchange. He also makes mittens for Himawari and Kohane, and has another run-in with PsychoMom. Oh, and there might, maaaybe have been some handsome green gloves in there for Doumeki. Maybe. Perhaps.
It‘s starting to get ugly: Watanuki is having episodes, worrisome fainting spells where he unconsciously enters the dream world. But Watanuki’s dreams aren’t normal: they’re convoluted and mazelike and very, very real. On his birthday, in fact, he meets Doumeki’s grandfather in a dream, who tells him about the old Chinese tale of the Butterfly’s Dream: a man dreams of being a butterfly, a dream so vivid and so real that when he wakes he asks himself, ‘am I a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man?’ He also meets Sakura in this dream, and discovers that she, Syaoran and himself all share the same birthdate; April 1st. He may not know it yet, but the pieces are falling into place.
Meanwhile, things aren’t looking up for Kohane-chan, whose unpopular appearances on supernatural-themed shows (she is, as you may imagine, the only real spirit medium on these broadcasts) are making her a target for further abuse, both physical and verbal, and her home a target for vandalism. When he and Doumeki visit her to cheer her up, her controlling mother crashes the party by throwing boiling tea water in Watanuki’s face. Thanks to Doumeki’s quick thinking, he isn’t scarred, but recuperates at the shop. He falls into another episode, this one worse than the last: a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream…and then he wakes up. In Somarium.
[Personality] Watanuki is a huge spaz, and that’s probably the first thing you’d notice about him. With time, and with Yuuko’s influence, he gets better, slowly but surely, but he can still enjoy a hysterical outburst now and again, but only with people who are close to him. Despite the fact that he lives alone, Watanuki is friendly and social, and usually quite polite (unless you‘re Doumeki). Even with Yuuko, whom he has been known to grumble at, he uses the more formal -san and maintains a respectful level of speech. He enjoys being around people, and because he isn’t supposed to exist, the relationships he forms with people keep him stable and anchored in reality. He treasures his friends deeply, and since taking up employment with Yuuko, has learned the value of equivalency in relationships; so for every gift he gets, he will go to great lengths to return the favour.
He’s a very neat, precise and meticulous person, despite appearances. All that flailing hides a master chef and competent domestic. While he will grumble and sigh and act like the sky is about to fall on him every time Yuuko asks him to do something, the fact remains that he will always accomplish the mission to the best of his ability. His self-esteem, previously quite low, is steadily growing as he takes on a more capable, self-assured persona towards people like Kohane-chan and Himawari. He’s still awkward around pretty girls (and to some extent, still ill-tempered around handsome guys), but is learning to put his best foot forward and to take calculated risks. He develops no serious romantic interests throughout the series, being limited to Himawari, the Zashiki-Warashi and Doumeki, but it’s safe to say he would never become interested in anyone he didn’t know extremely well.
Because he cannot remember his past, it’s difficult to say how much of his personality is affected by it, but he does share some common traits with Syaoran, such as courage, dedication and perseverance. He has no martial or magical skills, but is extremely autonomous and capable within a household.
[Specialties/Abilities] being so damn tsundere Watanuki can see supernatural phenomena, including but not limited to: ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, magic and really really strong habits. The affinity is mutual, as the spirits flock to him like flies to honey. He has a modicum of clairvoyancy, but it's mostly limited to traumatic personal experiences. He can also cook divinely well and cleans like a hotel professional.
[Affection] He will flail hard the first time, or at least be taken by surprise; typically, he's surprisingly conservative with his physical space. But generally speaking, if you're friends with him, and especially if you're younger than he is, he's fine with hugs. Hand-holding...only if you're younger or a potential love interest. Kissing is a big, huge no. Badtouching is only okay if you're Yuuko.
[Fighting] Please don't. He can't fight back. At all.
[Other Facts] Nope~
[Canon] xXxHolic
[Point Taken from Canon] Chapter 143
[Age] 16
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] ...we'll go with bisexual, but mostly uninterested.
[Eye Color] Left bright blue, right gold--see icon!
[Hair Color] Black
[Height] we'll say approx. 5'6"-5'7"? taller than the Japanese average, but not by much.
[Other] n/a for now. He looks pretty average. Kind of guy you'd miss if you weren't looking hard enough. Unless he's flailing.
[Clothing] He wears his school uniform, though if it's hot out he'll take off the jacket. When he's cooking and cleaning, he dons his waifu uniform.
[Background] Kimihiro Watanuki was created when Syaoran Li gave up fourteen years of his life to Yuuko Ichihara, the Dimension Witch; seven of those years went towards the possibility of rescuing his beloved Princess Sakura, and seven more towards assurance of Watanuki’s survival. Later, to allow Syaoran to rejoin the rest of the Tsubasa group after seven years of captivity, Watanuki gave up the entirety of his memories, from his home to his friends, to his parents’ names. That is how we find him at the beginning to xxxholic, living on his own and tormented by spirits. Drawn by his blood, made rich and sweet by the impossibility of his existence, they chase him relentlessly, until one day, he comes upon an odd little shop.
Within its doors, which he enters seemingly against his own better judgement, he meets the owner of the establishment, a certain Yuuko Ichihara, wish granter extraordinaire, and her two little helpers, Maru and Moro. In exchange for his service in her shop, she promises to cure him of his plague of spirits. Little does Watanuki know, his troubles have only begun. In fact, the first client Yuuko deals with--a woman whose lying habit manifests by causing her body to seize up--meets an unfortunate end when, unable to let go of her habit, she freezes in front of oncoming traffic. The second customer is no better; a woman whose internet addiction does not allow her a fulfilling life. This time Yuuko asks Watanuki to come with her to the customer’s home, lugging around a baseball bat. The witch’s methods of dealing with this problem are more proactive: the aluminium bat is baptized Zantetsuken (‘The Sword That Cuts Iron’) and, thanks to the power of names, is temporarily given the properties of a sword. It slices through the offending laptop like butter, and Yuuko happily collects a child’s high chair for her trouble. Incidentally, Watanuki gets to carry both the chair and the bat home.
Some time after these events, Yuuko receives a more formal visit. During a sun shower, she allows Watanuki to do a simple mirror divination, amplified by the combined power of sun and rain. He hears a sentence carried on the wind: “we’re coming, be ready to welcome us.” It’s all the warning he gets before the sky breaks open like an egg, releasing four mismatched people into the shop’s courtyard. One black-clad warrior, a white-clad mage, and a young man holding a comatose princess. Yuuko cannot help them, but she gives them the means to help themselves: Maru and Moro drag Watanuki into the shop’s vast treasure room, to fetch two funny-looking creatures. They’re called Mokonas; the white one will allow the four travellers to cross dimensions, and the black one will stay at the shop to serve as an intermediary. After collecting her price, Yuuko sends them on their way, and life, for the most part, goes back to ‘normal’ at the shop.
Yuuko’s next excursion with Watanuki is to demonstrate the difference between a proper diviner and a fake; in her line of work, of course, this is basic knowledge. After taking him to an impressive-looking but ultimately vague and content-shabby fortune teller, she leads him to the humble home of an old woman, both a good friend and professional contact. The old lady not only accurately predicts Watanuki’s name and birthdate, she seems to know the intimate details of his life without so much as a whisper of too much information. Impressed, Watanuki gladly accepts to cook her a royal feast in exchange.
During this time, the readers are properly introduced to Watanuki’s two best friends (well, one crush and one archrival, but let’s not get technical): Himawari Kunogi and Shizuka Doumeki. The bubbly and lively Himawari is Watanuki’s dream girl, but Yuuko’s first assessment of her is inauspicious: “she’s anything but your guardian angel.” On the other hand, the taciturn, athletic and popular Doumeki, captain of the archery club, who comes from a line of Buddhist priests, serves as a foil for Watanuki’s much more outspoken character. (It doesn’t help that he gets all the girls, either.) On a balmy summer evening, Yuuko organizes a Hyaku-Monotagari (lit. ‘One Hundred Tales’, where participants must tell 100 ghost stories to summon spirits) at Doumeki’s family’s temple. The evening goes as planned, except that, due to Watanuki’s attractiveness to spirits, the gang manages to summon a bunch of rather nasty houseguests. Luckily, Doumeki is imbued with a pure aura, allowing him to use his ki, or spirit energy, to ward off the monsters. Much to Watanuki’s chagrin, it would seem that hanging out with Doumeki is the only thing to do.
As expected, Watanuki and Doumeki soon begin to get sent on Yuuko’s missions together: the very first of these is the Angel-san case, where a kind of Ouija-like game has become rampantly popular in a local high school. Almost too much, as negative energy has begun to build. The two boys are dispatched on the scene, where they manage, just barely, to destroy the powerful spirit with all their limbs intact. Unfortunately, Doumeki breaks an arm, starting a chain of debts towards him that Watanuki must repay. Clearly, there’s no getting rid of this guy…
Yuuko also meets a new client, a woman who spots the Monkey’s Paw (based on the horror story by W. W. Jacobs of the same name) while the contents of the treasure room are out for yearly cleaning. She convinces Yuuko to sell it to her for a promise: never open it. It ended in sorrow; these types of things usually do.
On a more cheerful note, Watanuki makes a new friend: he meets a stalwart, honest fox merchant, proprietor of a supernatural oden (a kind of Japanese stew) stand. He gives the fox’s son one of Doumeki’s broken arrows, and wins the little cub’s eternal admiration, and a free meal. Apparently, foxes make excellent fried tofu.
The days are getting colder and Valentine’s day is around the corner. Watanuki makes a delicious chocolate fondant for Himawari; sadly, Doumeki eats it. Unluckily for him, because a Zashiki-Warashi (a lucky spirit) has taken a shine to someone and is desperately searching for a gift to give him! So she does the obvious thing, which is to steal the fondant--or its spiritual essence--right out of Doumeki’s body, taking his soul in the process. Now Watanuki has to find her, and retrieve Doumeki’s soul, before the clock strikes midnight. (I’d make a Cinderella reference, but you can fill in the blanks.) He confronts the Zashiki-Warashi with surprising results: she’s taken a shine to him! So he gets the soul and the fondant back, as well as a new admirer. That Watanuki, pretty popular with the ghost girls.
Watanuki gets the opportunity to interact with two more clients, twins who clearly haven’t read The Secret don’t understand the unfortunate power of negative thinking, and the strength of words. We are also allowed a glimpse into Watanuki’s past, confirming that he was in fact a socially inept child whose friends were mostly dead people. I’ve seen this in a movie before.
Things take a turn for the dramatic, however, when the shop receives a visit from the Ame-Warashi, or Rain Fairy. She needs Yuuko’s help: a friend of hers is in trouble. Needless to say, Watanuki and Doumeki are sent out. The problem area seems to be a huge hydrangea whose flowers are blooming an uncharacteristic blood red. Watanuki soon gets to the ‘root’ of the problem: the corpse of a murdered child was buried beneath the tree, and the tree was killing itself to keep her from entering Hell. Thanks to Watanuki, the tree can live again and the little girl gets closure. As compensation, the Ame-Warashi gives them a Pipe Fox, or kuda-kitsune, and the furry, snakelike creature quickly takes a shine to the put-upon errand boy.
For White Day (a month after Valentine’s, in Japan, where people who received chocolates on V-day get to return the favour), Watanuki visits the Zashiki-Warashi in her mountainous domain, with a pretty pair of hair clips; no chocolates, since he wasn’t sure when or if he’d be able to see her. She seems quite pleased by his offering anyways. Some time afterwards, Watanuki gets to participate in a demon parade (maybe not a great idea, but it was on Yuuko’s orders) and gets saved from becoming a snack by the cute little oden fox.
While Yuuko’s away, the errand boy will play. Or nearly get killed. Something like that. While Yuuko’s out doing something important (apparently, creating a god), Watanuki makes friends with a mysterious woman. They meet in the park and take an immediate liking to each other; she clearly sees a long-lost child in him, and he sees in her the mother he can’t remember. It quickly becomes apparent that spending time with her is taxing: Watanuki is becoming sick. Very sick. Sick to the point that increased exposure to this woman will kill him. But she’s so sad, and kind, and gentle--and Watanuki’s such a bleeding heart--that he can’t stop. So Doumeki, furious with worry, takes things into his own hands: he destroys the spirit woman, allowing Watanuki to heal. Watanuki learns a powerful lesson: we can only choose to accept or reject the decisions of others, but never control them. It takes some time, but Doumeki is eventually forgiven, and the two boys go back to their bickering.
Doumeki gets into even more trouble when he breaks Watanuki free from a spider’s web, destroying the web and gaining the spider’s ire in the process. The spider curses his right eye; feeling guilty for indirectly being the cause of Doumeki’s suffering, Watanuki exchanges his own right eye. Doumeki can now shoot arrows again, but he’s furious at what he sees as his friend’s unnecessary sacrifice. The boys search in vain for a cure in the Doumeki family archives, when a book worm comes out of a book they borrowed from Himawari and devours every last speck of useful information. They’re screwed now.
Watanuki begins to have hallucinations in the space where his right eye used to be; a pond, a field--apparently, the spirit world is fighting for the right to his eye, because he’s a Special Snowflake and his eye is a powerful magical artefact. The zashiki-Warashi is captured trying to rescue the eye and Watanuki desperately tries to save her from the clutches of the Spider Queen. While he does manage to save the girl, he ultimately loses the eye. Luckily, he’s got good friends, and he and Doumeki now share a right eye.
So it’s the new year (it went from March to the New Year’s, I don’t know, don’t ask me) and Watanuki’s first dream, meant to be symbolic, is of an eggplant. A huge eggplant, even! This actually a good thing because apparently the top three things to dream about are Mount Fuji, Eagles, and Eggplants. Oh, Japan. Watanuki’s luck is still crap, because he accidentally manages to buy Himawari’s nightmare; he offers her cookies right after hearing her recount the story. Luckily, Himawari passed the cookies on to Doumeki, who ate them and thereby gave him his own dream, of his archer grandfather on a proud horse. This results in a really bizarre dream in which Watanuki nearly gets eaten by a monster, but gets saved by prince charming a Doumeki look-alike on a noble steed. Yeah. He does get something out of the ordeal: a lovely golden arrow used to chase away the demon.
Watanuki and Yuuko meet up with the dream-seller, an anteater-looking creature in a beret, who is very interested in the arrow. Yuuko strikes up a bargain: five happy dreams in exchange for the arrow! The transaction takes place, and the pair receive five balloon-shaped dreams. Two of these go to Yuuko and Watanuki keeps three. The first he gives to the little oden fox for having saved him at the demon parade; the second is a lovely dream wherein he meets Haruka Doumeki, Shizuka’s grandfather, which results in some stupendous blackmail material. The third he saves for later. The next day he meets a young medium named Kohane and her neurotic, abusive mother. Together he and Kohane transfer the spirit of a haunted cherry tree to another, healthier tree in Doumeki’s temple, and give her a send-off with a happy game of mah-jong.
After a few more run-ins, namely with a cat-girl and his first real sighting of a corpse, Watanuki has another dream featuring Haruka-san. They talk about Doumeki and girls, and Haruka advises him to bring the third lucky dream to school the next day. On the way, however, Watanuki meets up with Kohane and gives her the dream instead. Bad idea. In the school hallways, he meets Himawari; she pats him on the back as a greeting, but when he leans against the window during their conversation, the pane pops open and he tumbles out. From the second floor.
He wakes up, covered head-to-toe in bandages, in the shop. His survival is covered by the combined efforts of Syaoran, Doumeki, Himawari and Haruka. Himawari feels the need to come clean, however: she’s got some bad mojo. She brings back luck, and it’s interacting with her that’s causing Watanuki all this pain. Luckily for her, Watanuki takes this all in stride, reaffirming what a good friend she is and how she brings joy to each of his days. Awwww.
Things start to get more normal again afterwards: Yuuko deals with a case involving a ghost girl who mistakenly thought the living members of her household were the ghosts, and Watanuki gets a meal of oden from the little fox and makes him some mitts in exchange. He also makes mittens for Himawari and Kohane, and has another run-in with PsychoMom. Oh, and there might, maaaybe have been some handsome green gloves in there for Doumeki. Maybe. Perhaps.
It‘s starting to get ugly: Watanuki is having episodes, worrisome fainting spells where he unconsciously enters the dream world. But Watanuki’s dreams aren’t normal: they’re convoluted and mazelike and very, very real. On his birthday, in fact, he meets Doumeki’s grandfather in a dream, who tells him about the old Chinese tale of the Butterfly’s Dream: a man dreams of being a butterfly, a dream so vivid and so real that when he wakes he asks himself, ‘am I a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man?’ He also meets Sakura in this dream, and discovers that she, Syaoran and himself all share the same birthdate; April 1st. He may not know it yet, but the pieces are falling into place.
Meanwhile, things aren’t looking up for Kohane-chan, whose unpopular appearances on supernatural-themed shows (she is, as you may imagine, the only real spirit medium on these broadcasts) are making her a target for further abuse, both physical and verbal, and her home a target for vandalism. When he and Doumeki visit her to cheer her up, her controlling mother crashes the party by throwing boiling tea water in Watanuki’s face. Thanks to Doumeki’s quick thinking, he isn’t scarred, but recuperates at the shop. He falls into another episode, this one worse than the last: a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream…and then he wakes up. In Somarium.
[Personality] Watanuki is a huge spaz, and that’s probably the first thing you’d notice about him. With time, and with Yuuko’s influence, he gets better, slowly but surely, but he can still enjoy a hysterical outburst now and again, but only with people who are close to him. Despite the fact that he lives alone, Watanuki is friendly and social, and usually quite polite (unless you‘re Doumeki). Even with Yuuko, whom he has been known to grumble at, he uses the more formal -san and maintains a respectful level of speech. He enjoys being around people, and because he isn’t supposed to exist, the relationships he forms with people keep him stable and anchored in reality. He treasures his friends deeply, and since taking up employment with Yuuko, has learned the value of equivalency in relationships; so for every gift he gets, he will go to great lengths to return the favour.
He’s a very neat, precise and meticulous person, despite appearances. All that flailing hides a master chef and competent domestic. While he will grumble and sigh and act like the sky is about to fall on him every time Yuuko asks him to do something, the fact remains that he will always accomplish the mission to the best of his ability. His self-esteem, previously quite low, is steadily growing as he takes on a more capable, self-assured persona towards people like Kohane-chan and Himawari. He’s still awkward around pretty girls (and to some extent, still ill-tempered around handsome guys), but is learning to put his best foot forward and to take calculated risks. He develops no serious romantic interests throughout the series, being limited to Himawari, the Zashiki-Warashi and Doumeki, but it’s safe to say he would never become interested in anyone he didn’t know extremely well.
Because he cannot remember his past, it’s difficult to say how much of his personality is affected by it, but he does share some common traits with Syaoran, such as courage, dedication and perseverance. He has no martial or magical skills, but is extremely autonomous and capable within a household.
[Specialties/Abilities] being so damn tsundere Watanuki can see supernatural phenomena, including but not limited to: ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, magic and really really strong habits. The affinity is mutual, as the spirits flock to him like flies to honey. He has a modicum of clairvoyancy, but it's mostly limited to traumatic personal experiences. He can also cook divinely well and cleans like a hotel professional.
[Affection] He will flail hard the first time, or at least be taken by surprise; typically, he's surprisingly conservative with his physical space. But generally speaking, if you're friends with him, and especially if you're younger than he is, he's fine with hugs. Hand-holding...only if you're younger or a potential love interest. Kissing is a big, huge no. Badtouching is only okay if you're Yuuko.
[Fighting] Please don't. He can't fight back. At all.
[Other Facts] Nope~