Paid in Full [xxxHOLiC, Doumeki/Watanuki, G]
Title: Paid In Full
Author/Artist: rhap-chan
Rating: G
Warnings: Pre-yaoi, mostly gen.
Word count: 1961 words
Prompt: 17 Nov - xxxholic, Yuuko, Doumeki/Watanuki (Yuuko leaves the Shop and all attendant contracts to Doumeki.): long term high pressure situation - Set a fool to roast eggs and a wise man to eat them.
A/N: AU. Does some weird things with mixing past and present.
Excerpt: The next day he goes to school, because if a customer needs him, they'll find him. Watanuki has told him the story about the trip to Ginza and he knows about the twins Watanuki and Yuuko had first seen in the supermarket. Yuuko was good at being in the right place at the right time. He supposes he'll find out whether that is deliberate or not.
She leaves him the shop, and this fact gives Doumeki pause.
It gives Watanuki pause as well, and then ammo for a thousand diatribes, which Doumeki ignores by virtue of long practice. He sits there on the porch next to the slip of paper delivered to him three weeks after Yuuko disappeared. The paper looks old, perhaps because it's stained with alcohol, and it curls up at the end.
"You've paid," Yuuko wrote. "The shop is yours." She signed it with a butterfly and his fingers brush against its wings as he shuts his eyes and thinks.
"I have no idea what she's talking about!" Watanuki is saying again, flailing his arms. (Doumeki doesn't have to have his eyes open to know that his companion is all irritation and elbows.) "What does she mean you paid? All you've done is drink her booze and drive me insane!"
"That's what she always did," Doumeki points out calmly. He doesn't think he's inherited the shop for this reason, but he knows it will distract Watanuki into another rant, and he can think if he sticks his fingers in his ears.
There is a lesson in this. There is a reason.
(Hitsuzen, Yuuko would say, leaning back against the porch langurously. He thinks that the memory is a dream, perhaps not even his own dream, but Watanuki's.)
"And you can't even see half the things I can see--" Watanuki is saying, and Doumeki shakes his head, because sharing an eye, sharing blood, means that he's learning to see all over again. His arrows still fly true but he can see the things that plague Watanuki, the things that flee at his approach. It really is a shame that Watanuki hasn't taken some of that ability from him.
"And who is going to grant my wish NOW? You don't have any power to do that! And I'm not working for you, absolutely NOT, NO WAY!"
"Make dinner," Doumeki says. Watanuki nearly screams at that.
But he does.
*
Doumeki lets her pipe go out, and then he takes it down to the temple and has it blessed. Mokona comes along, quieter now that its master is gone.
(You will never step foot in my shop, she'd said once, smirking, and he had been surprised later to realize that she'd been wrong. He wasn't surprised now to find out she was telling the truth. It had been his shop when he stepped into it. He just hadn't known it yet.)
He ruffles Mokona's ears and shares a drink with it until Watanuki comes back from school, hissing like an irritated cat about the fact that Doumeki skipped today, and he'd made all this food, and just because he is Yuuko's replacement doesn't mean he has to be a drunken glutton who lies around all day.
"I know," Doumeki answers, taking the bento from him. Watanuki stomps off to dust in the storeroom; "And I hope you figure out what you're doing before you get a customer!" he calls over his shoulder.
Doumeki hopes so too. He still has an egg tucked into his sleeve.
(So that the final moment will not be final, she'd said once, but not to him, and he doesn't know why he knows this fact. Mokona says that all worlds are connected in dreams.)
*
The next day he goes to school, because if a customer needs him, they'll find him. Watanuki has told him the story about the trip to Ginza and he knows about the twins Watanuki and Yuuko had first seen in the supermarket. Yuuko was good at being in the right place at the right time. He supposes he'll find out whether that is deliberate or not.
He shoots his second customer (because Watanuki, though the spastic boy won't admit it, is still his first).
"I wish," she breathes in his ear, "I wish, I wish, Dimension Wizard--"
But he turns and his eyes widen, just a little, and he lifts the bow. She's interrupted the end of archery practice and he gets no small amount of applause for the way his arrow flies straight through her and hits the target perfectly. His eyes have had to adjust since he gave half of the one to Watanuki, and his scores have gone down as a result.
But this arrow flies straight and true.
"What did you just do?" Watanuki hisses, looking frightened for a moment. He has come to practice because Himawari has, and also because, not that he will ever say this, but he doesn't know how to be in the shop anymore without Doumeki there, and he does not want to go home. "That was a customer--"
"I did what I chose to do," Doumeki answers. He puts the bow away and goes into the locker room to towel off.
The thing that he had shot, girl-shaped but sharp-toothed, would not have found Yuuko at all, thus preventing her need to make that choice. He knows he is not as good as she was. That's all right. She wouldn't have left him the shop if that would be a problem.
(There are some wishes I do not grant, she said to Watanuki once. There are some wishes that cannot be granted by anyone. He's had that dream alongside Watanuki three times already. He knows that Watanuki is having a hard time dealing with losing her.)
He has made his choice. He will not give Watanuki to these things, even if it is their dearest wish. Watanuki is no longer under Yuuko's protection. But perhaps the word will spread that he is under Doumeki's.
The third customer wants an old vase from the storeroom. She gives him the hair ribbons she wore the day her fiance left and promised to come back. The hair ribbons go to a nekomusume that follows Watanuki back to the shop one day.
That night, Watanuki is quiet when Doumeki pours the sake. He accepts a cup without complaint. His eyes are half-lidded and he stares up at the moon.
Yuuko is gone, but the spirits still follow Watanuki. She promised to grant his wish, but they still chase him unless Doumeki is near.
And that is why Doumeki considers Watanuki his first customer, and the one he does not know how to help. All that he can do is try to keep him safe, but that is not the permanent solution Watanuki wants.
He stares up at the moon and drinks Yuuko's alcohol, and it's bitter on his tongue.
(A shop where wishes are granted, Yuuko says, her head resting on her hand, the smell of smoke sharp and new in his nose, and he pushes his glasses up and knows he is dreaming Watanuki's dreams again.)
*
Time does not pass within the shop. Maru and Moro cling to Watanuki's legs and do not age. Mokona helps Doumeki with customers and drinks half of the booze.
But outside, the world changes, little by little. The things that want Watanuki come by less and less. Word has gotten around. Sometime in the third year since Doumeki has gained custody of the shop, they stop altogether.
Watanuki doesn't appear to notice. He still spends evenings and weekends at the shop, whenever Doumeki is there, cleaning and cooking and complaining. Sometimes Doumeki tells him to stay overnight, and he never refuses, even though on those nights they often drink too much and Doumeki has to drag the boy to Yuuko's couch. He will always think of it as hers and much prefers a neglected chair he pulls out of storage.
And because Doumeki understands Yuuko's system, he knows he's running up a tab he doesn't know how to pay, even now. He's majoring in folklore and reading all of the books his grandfather left him, but he knows he could cover Watanuki in wards, if Watanuki would agree to it, which he won't, and say all the prayers that he knows, but if Watanuki left him and the shop, the creatures would come back.
(They are attracted to your blood, Yuuko purrs, and Doumeki has given Watanuki his blood, but this is deeper than red cells and white, platelets and plasma.)
Doumeki spends most of the summer of the third year in the storeroom, methodically examining every item. He forgets to eat lunch sometimes and Watanuki complains, bustling around in the apron Himawari gave him and muttering about portion sizes and the fact that Doumeki has dust on his eyebrows.
"You haven't cleaned in there lately," Doumeki answers, sipping at his cup. When Watanuki sets the plate in front of him, he says, "Thanks."
Watanuki pauses and stares.
"What?"
"Nothing," Watanuki answers irritably.
Doumeki finds nothing in the storeroom that answers his question. Though the catalogue he finishes in the end would be worth any price to the right buyer, it isn't something he would sell.
*
The fourth year is a year of dreams. They've increased in frequency as time has passed, but now Doumeki finds himself drifting into pasts, thoughts, memories, dreams without any warning. It reminds Watanuki of those few months when he wasn't sure he existed, and it makes him worry. He moves into the shop and lets his apartment go.
Doumeki wakes up in strange places. Or dreams them.
"You sleep too late," Watanuki mutters in his ear, irritably. "What are you going to do if you get a real job? There is an alarm clock, you know."
"Hn," Doumeki answers, blinking, and Watanuki shifts in the bed and gets up, nudging at Doumeki with a foot but no real annoyance.
"I'm making breakfast," he says, padding away in bare feet towards the kitchen.
Doumeki turns and looks up at the ceiling. He recognizes his grandfather's old apartment.
"Come on, then, I'm meeting Kohane-chan at ten!" Watanuki calls back into the bedroom. "You can't be that tired still."
He gets up but when he steps through the door, he realizes this is another dream, as Watanuki turns to look at him, lifting a hand on which a small golden band gleams.
*
He doesn't know what's real anymore, and he doesn't realize he's said it out loud until Yuuko answers him. She's there, suddenly, her nails sharp against his cheek, and she answers, "All of it."
She fades away, her red grin the last thing to disappear, like the demented cat from a book Doumeki read once when he was young.
*
"I knew she shouldn't have," Watanuki mutters to himself one day, picking up dishes, and Doumeki puts a hand on his arm. He looks up at Watanuki steadily.
"I'll figure it out," he says.
(I'll keep the shop, Watanuki says in his dreams, clutching at kimono, and wait for her to come back.)
"I'll figure it out," he repeats.
"Idiot," Watanuki mutters, but with no vitrol in it.
"Shizuka," Doumeki says.
"What?"
"My name."
"You always just call me 'oi!'" Watanuki snaps. "Why would I want to use your first name?"
Doumeki shrugs.
*
That night he dreams another dream he's never had before and Watanuki reaches out to take the egg from his hand. He looks surprised and frightened but determined, all at once.
Nothing will be born from that egg, Yuuko says, her voice an odd echo in the nonspace of the dreamworld. He cannot see her through his eyes or Watanuki's.
Watanuki cradles the egg to his chest. He doesn't appear to have heard her.
But, Yuuko says, and he can smell her smoke, something might be born from you.
Doumeki nods. He steps forward and reaches for the egg and takes Watanuki's hand instead.
"Shizuka," Watanuki says uncertainly. "This is a dream--"
"Real enough," Doumeki answers, pulling Watanuki close to his chest.
And then he wakes up.
Author/Artist: rhap-chan
Rating: G
Warnings: Pre-yaoi, mostly gen.
Word count: 1961 words
Prompt: 17 Nov - xxxholic, Yuuko, Doumeki/Watanuki (Yuuko leaves the Shop and all attendant contracts to Doumeki.): long term high pressure situation - Set a fool to roast eggs and a wise man to eat them.
A/N: AU. Does some weird things with mixing past and present.
Excerpt: The next day he goes to school, because if a customer needs him, they'll find him. Watanuki has told him the story about the trip to Ginza and he knows about the twins Watanuki and Yuuko had first seen in the supermarket. Yuuko was good at being in the right place at the right time. He supposes he'll find out whether that is deliberate or not.
She leaves him the shop, and this fact gives Doumeki pause.
It gives Watanuki pause as well, and then ammo for a thousand diatribes, which Doumeki ignores by virtue of long practice. He sits there on the porch next to the slip of paper delivered to him three weeks after Yuuko disappeared. The paper looks old, perhaps because it's stained with alcohol, and it curls up at the end.
"You've paid," Yuuko wrote. "The shop is yours." She signed it with a butterfly and his fingers brush against its wings as he shuts his eyes and thinks.
"I have no idea what she's talking about!" Watanuki is saying again, flailing his arms. (Doumeki doesn't have to have his eyes open to know that his companion is all irritation and elbows.) "What does she mean you paid? All you've done is drink her booze and drive me insane!"
"That's what she always did," Doumeki points out calmly. He doesn't think he's inherited the shop for this reason, but he knows it will distract Watanuki into another rant, and he can think if he sticks his fingers in his ears.
There is a lesson in this. There is a reason.
(Hitsuzen, Yuuko would say, leaning back against the porch langurously. He thinks that the memory is a dream, perhaps not even his own dream, but Watanuki's.)
"And you can't even see half the things I can see--" Watanuki is saying, and Doumeki shakes his head, because sharing an eye, sharing blood, means that he's learning to see all over again. His arrows still fly true but he can see the things that plague Watanuki, the things that flee at his approach. It really is a shame that Watanuki hasn't taken some of that ability from him.
"And who is going to grant my wish NOW? You don't have any power to do that! And I'm not working for you, absolutely NOT, NO WAY!"
"Make dinner," Doumeki says. Watanuki nearly screams at that.
But he does.
*
Doumeki lets her pipe go out, and then he takes it down to the temple and has it blessed. Mokona comes along, quieter now that its master is gone.
(You will never step foot in my shop, she'd said once, smirking, and he had been surprised later to realize that she'd been wrong. He wasn't surprised now to find out she was telling the truth. It had been his shop when he stepped into it. He just hadn't known it yet.)
He ruffles Mokona's ears and shares a drink with it until Watanuki comes back from school, hissing like an irritated cat about the fact that Doumeki skipped today, and he'd made all this food, and just because he is Yuuko's replacement doesn't mean he has to be a drunken glutton who lies around all day.
"I know," Doumeki answers, taking the bento from him. Watanuki stomps off to dust in the storeroom; "And I hope you figure out what you're doing before you get a customer!" he calls over his shoulder.
Doumeki hopes so too. He still has an egg tucked into his sleeve.
(So that the final moment will not be final, she'd said once, but not to him, and he doesn't know why he knows this fact. Mokona says that all worlds are connected in dreams.)
*
The next day he goes to school, because if a customer needs him, they'll find him. Watanuki has told him the story about the trip to Ginza and he knows about the twins Watanuki and Yuuko had first seen in the supermarket. Yuuko was good at being in the right place at the right time. He supposes he'll find out whether that is deliberate or not.
He shoots his second customer (because Watanuki, though the spastic boy won't admit it, is still his first).
"I wish," she breathes in his ear, "I wish, I wish, Dimension Wizard--"
But he turns and his eyes widen, just a little, and he lifts the bow. She's interrupted the end of archery practice and he gets no small amount of applause for the way his arrow flies straight through her and hits the target perfectly. His eyes have had to adjust since he gave half of the one to Watanuki, and his scores have gone down as a result.
But this arrow flies straight and true.
"What did you just do?" Watanuki hisses, looking frightened for a moment. He has come to practice because Himawari has, and also because, not that he will ever say this, but he doesn't know how to be in the shop anymore without Doumeki there, and he does not want to go home. "That was a customer--"
"I did what I chose to do," Doumeki answers. He puts the bow away and goes into the locker room to towel off.
The thing that he had shot, girl-shaped but sharp-toothed, would not have found Yuuko at all, thus preventing her need to make that choice. He knows he is not as good as she was. That's all right. She wouldn't have left him the shop if that would be a problem.
(There are some wishes I do not grant, she said to Watanuki once. There are some wishes that cannot be granted by anyone. He's had that dream alongside Watanuki three times already. He knows that Watanuki is having a hard time dealing with losing her.)
He has made his choice. He will not give Watanuki to these things, even if it is their dearest wish. Watanuki is no longer under Yuuko's protection. But perhaps the word will spread that he is under Doumeki's.
The third customer wants an old vase from the storeroom. She gives him the hair ribbons she wore the day her fiance left and promised to come back. The hair ribbons go to a nekomusume that follows Watanuki back to the shop one day.
That night, Watanuki is quiet when Doumeki pours the sake. He accepts a cup without complaint. His eyes are half-lidded and he stares up at the moon.
Yuuko is gone, but the spirits still follow Watanuki. She promised to grant his wish, but they still chase him unless Doumeki is near.
And that is why Doumeki considers Watanuki his first customer, and the one he does not know how to help. All that he can do is try to keep him safe, but that is not the permanent solution Watanuki wants.
He stares up at the moon and drinks Yuuko's alcohol, and it's bitter on his tongue.
(A shop where wishes are granted, Yuuko says, her head resting on her hand, the smell of smoke sharp and new in his nose, and he pushes his glasses up and knows he is dreaming Watanuki's dreams again.)
*
Time does not pass within the shop. Maru and Moro cling to Watanuki's legs and do not age. Mokona helps Doumeki with customers and drinks half of the booze.
But outside, the world changes, little by little. The things that want Watanuki come by less and less. Word has gotten around. Sometime in the third year since Doumeki has gained custody of the shop, they stop altogether.
Watanuki doesn't appear to notice. He still spends evenings and weekends at the shop, whenever Doumeki is there, cleaning and cooking and complaining. Sometimes Doumeki tells him to stay overnight, and he never refuses, even though on those nights they often drink too much and Doumeki has to drag the boy to Yuuko's couch. He will always think of it as hers and much prefers a neglected chair he pulls out of storage.
And because Doumeki understands Yuuko's system, he knows he's running up a tab he doesn't know how to pay, even now. He's majoring in folklore and reading all of the books his grandfather left him, but he knows he could cover Watanuki in wards, if Watanuki would agree to it, which he won't, and say all the prayers that he knows, but if Watanuki left him and the shop, the creatures would come back.
(They are attracted to your blood, Yuuko purrs, and Doumeki has given Watanuki his blood, but this is deeper than red cells and white, platelets and plasma.)
Doumeki spends most of the summer of the third year in the storeroom, methodically examining every item. He forgets to eat lunch sometimes and Watanuki complains, bustling around in the apron Himawari gave him and muttering about portion sizes and the fact that Doumeki has dust on his eyebrows.
"You haven't cleaned in there lately," Doumeki answers, sipping at his cup. When Watanuki sets the plate in front of him, he says, "Thanks."
Watanuki pauses and stares.
"What?"
"Nothing," Watanuki answers irritably.
Doumeki finds nothing in the storeroom that answers his question. Though the catalogue he finishes in the end would be worth any price to the right buyer, it isn't something he would sell.
*
The fourth year is a year of dreams. They've increased in frequency as time has passed, but now Doumeki finds himself drifting into pasts, thoughts, memories, dreams without any warning. It reminds Watanuki of those few months when he wasn't sure he existed, and it makes him worry. He moves into the shop and lets his apartment go.
Doumeki wakes up in strange places. Or dreams them.
"You sleep too late," Watanuki mutters in his ear, irritably. "What are you going to do if you get a real job? There is an alarm clock, you know."
"Hn," Doumeki answers, blinking, and Watanuki shifts in the bed and gets up, nudging at Doumeki with a foot but no real annoyance.
"I'm making breakfast," he says, padding away in bare feet towards the kitchen.
Doumeki turns and looks up at the ceiling. He recognizes his grandfather's old apartment.
"Come on, then, I'm meeting Kohane-chan at ten!" Watanuki calls back into the bedroom. "You can't be that tired still."
He gets up but when he steps through the door, he realizes this is another dream, as Watanuki turns to look at him, lifting a hand on which a small golden band gleams.
*
He doesn't know what's real anymore, and he doesn't realize he's said it out loud until Yuuko answers him. She's there, suddenly, her nails sharp against his cheek, and she answers, "All of it."
She fades away, her red grin the last thing to disappear, like the demented cat from a book Doumeki read once when he was young.
*
"I knew she shouldn't have," Watanuki mutters to himself one day, picking up dishes, and Doumeki puts a hand on his arm. He looks up at Watanuki steadily.
"I'll figure it out," he says.
(I'll keep the shop, Watanuki says in his dreams, clutching at kimono, and wait for her to come back.)
"I'll figure it out," he repeats.
"Idiot," Watanuki mutters, but with no vitrol in it.
"Shizuka," Doumeki says.
"What?"
"My name."
"You always just call me 'oi!'" Watanuki snaps. "Why would I want to use your first name?"
Doumeki shrugs.
*
That night he dreams another dream he's never had before and Watanuki reaches out to take the egg from his hand. He looks surprised and frightened but determined, all at once.
Nothing will be born from that egg, Yuuko says, her voice an odd echo in the nonspace of the dreamworld. He cannot see her through his eyes or Watanuki's.
Watanuki cradles the egg to his chest. He doesn't appear to have heard her.
But, Yuuko says, and he can smell her smoke, something might be born from you.
Doumeki nods. He steps forward and reaches for the egg and takes Watanuki's hand instead.
"Shizuka," Watanuki says uncertainly. "This is a dream--"
"Real enough," Doumeki answers, pulling Watanuki close to his chest.
And then he wakes up.