The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories (draft) - Part 24
That whole 'chapter-a-week' schedule hasn't been working out so well for me lately, has it? >.> 'Least I'm in under the two week mark this time around.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Side Story 1
When Syaoran came to get them the following morning, they were curled up together on Doumeki’s mattress, the sunbeams creeping through the boarding on the window already doing their share to pull them out of sleep. Syaoran had never quite gotten the idea of knocking.
“Oi, Shizuka,” he called from the doorway, “Kurogane said to tell you you’ll be late for this morning’s hunt if you’re not up soon.” When he’d decided Doumeki looked awake enough to have heard the message, he disappeared again almost as quickly as he’d appeared.
Watanuki went from sleep to embarrassment to a kind of horrified fascination within the space of about ten seconds. “Doesn’t anything phase him?” was the first thing he said that day.
“Not this,” replied Doumeki, not exactly at his best himself at this morning, despite all practice. The task of disentangling himself from Watanuki was being complicated by the fact that his bed-mate was apparently lying on some part of his body that, against all logic, he couldn’t immediately identify.
“But… he knew we were…”
“Yes.” Doumeki couldn’t think of any reason to assume otherwise.
“Didn’t he even…” Watanuki blathered on, hopelessly stuck on the subject of what a boy of Syaoran’s nature would or would be expected to know about sex.
“He’s always been an early riser,” said Doumeki. “He’s probably done the same with Kurogane and Fye before.”
“….them!?”
Doumeki gave an elaborate shrug to imply that what their older camp mates might or might not have ever done in the privacy of their own buildings wasn’t any great concern of his.
“I was really quite happy not knowing that,” Watanuki complained to him. Doumeki nearly did the shrug again, the stopped himself. He just didn’t have much more to say on the subject.
“At least he didn’t freak at us,” Watanuki murmured.
“He’s probably telling the others why we’re late up right now,” said Doumeki thoughtfully.
Watanuki buried is head in the pillow with a moan. “You’re the one they want for the hunt. I’m staying here until they all forget about me.”
“You’d prefer speculation about how much I wore you out?”
Watanuki gave another groan of slightly different tenor, and started groping for his clothes.
Doumeki paused in the hunt for his own clothes long enough to watch a sleepy Watanuki disentangling himself from the unfamiliar arrangement of blankets and getting to his feet. He was no less painfully skinny than he’d been the first day Doumeki had met him, and the scar from the bullet wound on his shoulder was still visible as an ugly, raised splotch, but the bruises that Doumeki remembered from the first time he’d seen Watanuki in a similar state of undress as evidence of what he’d faced in the hands of his last gang had long ago yellowed and faded away to leave only smooth, pale skin behind. It occurred to him he should be asking Watanuki how he was doing this morning but he pushed the impulse away again. He could already tell.
“What are you looking at?” Watanuki complained over his shoulder.
“What do you think?” Doumeki had thought that too obvious to be worth hiding.
Watanuki turned away from him and reached for his shirt, grumbling about how they were both meant to be getting dressed and out of here before they were anymore late here, but not before Doumeki caught the edge of an odd kind of smile on his face.
***
Kurogane wasn’t the type for habits like pacing, but he was radiating a level of impatience when Syaoran got back to where the others were waiting.
“They’ll be a few more minutes,” Syaoran reported. Lesser mortals might have been intimidated by Kurogane’s expression, but the knowledge he’d followed instructions to the letter was enough for to rid Syaoran of all imagined responsibility.
“They were still in bed?” asked Sakura. “They’re not usually up this late.”
“Yeah, the same bed,” reported Syaoran.
‘Stunned and wide-eyed’ did not do justice to Sakura’s expression. She looked rather as though she’d just swallowed her mouth. “The… they were.. when you went in…!?”
“Just sleeping,” Syaoran corrected her. “Probably before though. Maybe that’s why they sleept in,” he added, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
“Well!” said Fye, dragging the simple word out with a weight its single syllable should never have supported and pairing it with a smile that suggested he’d heard nothing nearly so fascinating all year. “Who would have thought?”
“Kimihiro and… Shizuka?” asked Kohane, curiously, looking from one person to the next. “They were…?”
“I don’t know about ‘were’ but it certainly sounds a though they are now,” said Fye, still sounding immensely pleased.
“B… but that’s good for them, isn’t it?” Sakura stuttered out all in a rush, determined to have her input despite being bright red.
“Oh, absolutely!” Fye agreed. “Good for both of them. I wonder if they need any pointers…?” he mused, sneaking a glance at Kurogane.
“They’ll be more grateful for some privacy,” said Kurogane, glaring at him in a creative manner that somehow allowed him to avoid looking Fye in the eye.
“Oh Kuro,” Fye sighed, “why do you always have to ruin all my fun?” His eyes flickered to something over Kurogane’s shoulder. “And here they are at last! Sleep well, boys?”
“Fine,” said Doumeki, noncommittally. Watanuki looked flushed and a little too obviously trying to avoid looking directly at anyone, let alone Fye. Sakura suddenly found it very necessary to bustle around at twice her usual speed in order to serve out the two boys their breakfast. Kurogane rolled his eyes and silently resolved not to bother talking anything out with Doumeki in future.
***
On the whole, Doumeki found there wasn’t much reaction from the camp at large. Syaoran and Kurogane didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and Sakura was determined to be happy for them. Fye doubtless had plenty to say on the subject, but hadn’t yet had the chance to corner one or both of them long enough to share it, which was probably something he should be grateful for as long as it lasted. The one remaining exception was Kohane. Doumeki had only thought about how she’d react to it all in the vaguest of terms, but when he found her hovering around after lunch that day, he couldn’t find it in himself to be too surprised to see her.
“Yes?” he prompted, although he was fairly sure he knew the form of what she was going to say.
Kohane took another step around the corner of the building she’d been peering from behind to bring herself into full view and swallowed slightly. “They were saying… you and Kimihiro were…?”
There wasn’t any point in denying it. “Yeah. They weren’t wrong.”
“Should I have known before? The others didn’t seem very surprised…”
“There’s no reason you should have,” Doumeki told her. He could have said more , about how new this was even to them, but couldn’t decide how truthful that would be. Kohane wasn’t blind, she’d understand that details were private. Instead, he added, “It doesn’t mean he cares about you any less.”
“I know,” she replied, perfectly understanding. “I was just thinking, it must be nice to have something like that. I don’t know whether I ever will.”
“No-one knows,” said Doumeki honestly. “It isn’t something you can go looking for, or see coming. Or avoid.” There was something familiar about the words as he uttered them that made him wonder whether he was repeating something he’d heard before. Had his grandfather ever brought up this subject with him? He couldn’t remember for sure.
Kohane nodded solemnly. “I understand. And I am glad for him. He deserves to have something like that.”
Doumeki could only agree. “He does.”
***
Apart from that, not much really changed. It didn’t need to.
There had only ever been a couple of feet of space between Doumeki’s mattress and Watanuki’s, so shoving them together was no chore, though generally they both wound up on Doumeki’s most of the time until the warming weather started to make close contact less pleasant. Nothing in their daytime routine changed; there was no space or need for it to. Neither had much that needed to be said out loud on the subject of the change in their relationship, and Watanuki was still visibly hesitant about testing the waters of their new truce by saying any more on the topic of his ghosts than his role required. He would never initiate anything between them directly either, but he did quickly develop a way of looking at Doumeki which was as good as saying, “Excuse me, why are you still wearing clothes right now?” which was pretty much just as good.
The chief change was that the tension that had hung between them over the last few months was finally gone, and there was a more comfortable quality to the stillness between them than there had ever been before.
It occurred to Doumeki before long that their conversation that night about the ghosts hadn’t been quite finished when they ended it, but whatever might have been left to be said there was no urgency to it. The subject was destined to come up again eventually when Watanuki was feeling more comfortable with their new situation, but there was plenty of time.
As for Watanuki himself, the strangest part was waking up in the morning and not having to remind himself everything was different. If he didn’t stop to analyse, this felt so natural and inevitable that it was surprising to think he had any reason to be surprised about it at all.
When he’d gotten over his initial period of ground-shaking disorientation with the strangeness of the new camp, it had struck him as bizarre how much of everything he did went through Doumeki, one way or another. He’d realised before long that it was because Doumeki had been assigned to keep an eye on him, then later he’d realised that didn’t apply anymore now he’d been at the camp for so long, then it had occurred to him it was probably just habit leftover from his earlier days, then he’d gone on to realise it was all just down to how dependent on Doumeki he’d let himself become. At various other stages, he’d also realised that the attraction was bound to be no more than a reaction to Doumeki’s resistance to evil spirits, that it had started well before he’d even realised for sure that Doumeki was doing that at all, that it was all a need to cling to anything strong enough to take care of him and the opposite of everything Himawari had ever broken, that that was wrong because he’d never needed anything like that before, that that was irrelevant too because he’d never been offered anything like this before; that it was some twisted version of Stockholm Syndrome where he’d been ripe to latch on to the first person who was even remotely nice to him, and a dozen other back-and-forths along those lines, none of which ever lasted long as a remotely satisfying explanation for why the thought a day might come when he never saw Doumeki again left him breathless and sore on a level he’d rarely even imagined.
He’d never got as far as wondering seriously whether Doumeki was nearly as attached to him.
If he let himself think about it too long, he could never come to any other conclusion than that it couldn’t possibly be real, but if it was a dream, it was all he could do to keep himself from waking up as long as possible.
Just maybe, if he could go on long enough, perhaps he could forget how to wake up at all.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Side Story 1
When Syaoran came to get them the following morning, they were curled up together on Doumeki’s mattress, the sunbeams creeping through the boarding on the window already doing their share to pull them out of sleep. Syaoran had never quite gotten the idea of knocking.
“Oi, Shizuka,” he called from the doorway, “Kurogane said to tell you you’ll be late for this morning’s hunt if you’re not up soon.” When he’d decided Doumeki looked awake enough to have heard the message, he disappeared again almost as quickly as he’d appeared.
Watanuki went from sleep to embarrassment to a kind of horrified fascination within the space of about ten seconds. “Doesn’t anything phase him?” was the first thing he said that day.
“Not this,” replied Doumeki, not exactly at his best himself at this morning, despite all practice. The task of disentangling himself from Watanuki was being complicated by the fact that his bed-mate was apparently lying on some part of his body that, against all logic, he couldn’t immediately identify.
“But… he knew we were…”
“Yes.” Doumeki couldn’t think of any reason to assume otherwise.
“Didn’t he even…” Watanuki blathered on, hopelessly stuck on the subject of what a boy of Syaoran’s nature would or would be expected to know about sex.
“He’s always been an early riser,” said Doumeki. “He’s probably done the same with Kurogane and Fye before.”
“….them!?”
Doumeki gave an elaborate shrug to imply that what their older camp mates might or might not have ever done in the privacy of their own buildings wasn’t any great concern of his.
“I was really quite happy not knowing that,” Watanuki complained to him. Doumeki nearly did the shrug again, the stopped himself. He just didn’t have much more to say on the subject.
“At least he didn’t freak at us,” Watanuki murmured.
“He’s probably telling the others why we’re late up right now,” said Doumeki thoughtfully.
Watanuki buried is head in the pillow with a moan. “You’re the one they want for the hunt. I’m staying here until they all forget about me.”
“You’d prefer speculation about how much I wore you out?”
Watanuki gave another groan of slightly different tenor, and started groping for his clothes.
Doumeki paused in the hunt for his own clothes long enough to watch a sleepy Watanuki disentangling himself from the unfamiliar arrangement of blankets and getting to his feet. He was no less painfully skinny than he’d been the first day Doumeki had met him, and the scar from the bullet wound on his shoulder was still visible as an ugly, raised splotch, but the bruises that Doumeki remembered from the first time he’d seen Watanuki in a similar state of undress as evidence of what he’d faced in the hands of his last gang had long ago yellowed and faded away to leave only smooth, pale skin behind. It occurred to him he should be asking Watanuki how he was doing this morning but he pushed the impulse away again. He could already tell.
“What are you looking at?” Watanuki complained over his shoulder.
“What do you think?” Doumeki had thought that too obvious to be worth hiding.
Watanuki turned away from him and reached for his shirt, grumbling about how they were both meant to be getting dressed and out of here before they were anymore late here, but not before Doumeki caught the edge of an odd kind of smile on his face.
***
Kurogane wasn’t the type for habits like pacing, but he was radiating a level of impatience when Syaoran got back to where the others were waiting.
“They’ll be a few more minutes,” Syaoran reported. Lesser mortals might have been intimidated by Kurogane’s expression, but the knowledge he’d followed instructions to the letter was enough for to rid Syaoran of all imagined responsibility.
“They were still in bed?” asked Sakura. “They’re not usually up this late.”
“Yeah, the same bed,” reported Syaoran.
‘Stunned and wide-eyed’ did not do justice to Sakura’s expression. She looked rather as though she’d just swallowed her mouth. “The… they were.. when you went in…!?”
“Just sleeping,” Syaoran corrected her. “Probably before though. Maybe that’s why they sleept in,” he added, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
“Well!” said Fye, dragging the simple word out with a weight its single syllable should never have supported and pairing it with a smile that suggested he’d heard nothing nearly so fascinating all year. “Who would have thought?”
“Kimihiro and… Shizuka?” asked Kohane, curiously, looking from one person to the next. “They were…?”
“I don’t know about ‘were’ but it certainly sounds a though they are now,” said Fye, still sounding immensely pleased.
“B… but that’s good for them, isn’t it?” Sakura stuttered out all in a rush, determined to have her input despite being bright red.
“Oh, absolutely!” Fye agreed. “Good for both of them. I wonder if they need any pointers…?” he mused, sneaking a glance at Kurogane.
“They’ll be more grateful for some privacy,” said Kurogane, glaring at him in a creative manner that somehow allowed him to avoid looking Fye in the eye.
“Oh Kuro,” Fye sighed, “why do you always have to ruin all my fun?” His eyes flickered to something over Kurogane’s shoulder. “And here they are at last! Sleep well, boys?”
“Fine,” said Doumeki, noncommittally. Watanuki looked flushed and a little too obviously trying to avoid looking directly at anyone, let alone Fye. Sakura suddenly found it very necessary to bustle around at twice her usual speed in order to serve out the two boys their breakfast. Kurogane rolled his eyes and silently resolved not to bother talking anything out with Doumeki in future.
***
On the whole, Doumeki found there wasn’t much reaction from the camp at large. Syaoran and Kurogane didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and Sakura was determined to be happy for them. Fye doubtless had plenty to say on the subject, but hadn’t yet had the chance to corner one or both of them long enough to share it, which was probably something he should be grateful for as long as it lasted. The one remaining exception was Kohane. Doumeki had only thought about how she’d react to it all in the vaguest of terms, but when he found her hovering around after lunch that day, he couldn’t find it in himself to be too surprised to see her.
“Yes?” he prompted, although he was fairly sure he knew the form of what she was going to say.
Kohane took another step around the corner of the building she’d been peering from behind to bring herself into full view and swallowed slightly. “They were saying… you and Kimihiro were…?”
There wasn’t any point in denying it. “Yeah. They weren’t wrong.”
“Should I have known before? The others didn’t seem very surprised…”
“There’s no reason you should have,” Doumeki told her. He could have said more , about how new this was even to them, but couldn’t decide how truthful that would be. Kohane wasn’t blind, she’d understand that details were private. Instead, he added, “It doesn’t mean he cares about you any less.”
“I know,” she replied, perfectly understanding. “I was just thinking, it must be nice to have something like that. I don’t know whether I ever will.”
“No-one knows,” said Doumeki honestly. “It isn’t something you can go looking for, or see coming. Or avoid.” There was something familiar about the words as he uttered them that made him wonder whether he was repeating something he’d heard before. Had his grandfather ever brought up this subject with him? He couldn’t remember for sure.
Kohane nodded solemnly. “I understand. And I am glad for him. He deserves to have something like that.”
Doumeki could only agree. “He does.”
***
Apart from that, not much really changed. It didn’t need to.
There had only ever been a couple of feet of space between Doumeki’s mattress and Watanuki’s, so shoving them together was no chore, though generally they both wound up on Doumeki’s most of the time until the warming weather started to make close contact less pleasant. Nothing in their daytime routine changed; there was no space or need for it to. Neither had much that needed to be said out loud on the subject of the change in their relationship, and Watanuki was still visibly hesitant about testing the waters of their new truce by saying any more on the topic of his ghosts than his role required. He would never initiate anything between them directly either, but he did quickly develop a way of looking at Doumeki which was as good as saying, “Excuse me, why are you still wearing clothes right now?” which was pretty much just as good.
The chief change was that the tension that had hung between them over the last few months was finally gone, and there was a more comfortable quality to the stillness between them than there had ever been before.
It occurred to Doumeki before long that their conversation that night about the ghosts hadn’t been quite finished when they ended it, but whatever might have been left to be said there was no urgency to it. The subject was destined to come up again eventually when Watanuki was feeling more comfortable with their new situation, but there was plenty of time.
As for Watanuki himself, the strangest part was waking up in the morning and not having to remind himself everything was different. If he didn’t stop to analyse, this felt so natural and inevitable that it was surprising to think he had any reason to be surprised about it at all.
When he’d gotten over his initial period of ground-shaking disorientation with the strangeness of the new camp, it had struck him as bizarre how much of everything he did went through Doumeki, one way or another. He’d realised before long that it was because Doumeki had been assigned to keep an eye on him, then later he’d realised that didn’t apply anymore now he’d been at the camp for so long, then it had occurred to him it was probably just habit leftover from his earlier days, then he’d gone on to realise it was all just down to how dependent on Doumeki he’d let himself become. At various other stages, he’d also realised that the attraction was bound to be no more than a reaction to Doumeki’s resistance to evil spirits, that it had started well before he’d even realised for sure that Doumeki was doing that at all, that it was all a need to cling to anything strong enough to take care of him and the opposite of everything Himawari had ever broken, that that was wrong because he’d never needed anything like that before, that that was irrelevant too because he’d never been offered anything like this before; that it was some twisted version of Stockholm Syndrome where he’d been ripe to latch on to the first person who was even remotely nice to him, and a dozen other back-and-forths along those lines, none of which ever lasted long as a remotely satisfying explanation for why the thought a day might come when he never saw Doumeki again left him breathless and sore on a level he’d rarely even imagined.
He’d never got as far as wondering seriously whether Doumeki was nearly as attached to him.
If he let himself think about it too long, he could never come to any other conclusion than that it couldn’t possibly be real, but if it was a dream, it was all he could do to keep himself from waking up as long as possible.
Just maybe, if he could go on long enough, perhaps he could forget how to wake up at all.