[Fic] Dreams and Realities, chapter three
TITLE: Dreams and Realities, chapter three (of four)
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: After longer than I thought it would take, I finally managed to fix some things from this chapter I was never very happy about. It should read better now, so thanks for your patience! Once again, thanks to my wonderful betas
beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their invaluable help.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Watanuki dreamt. It has already been established that that, in itself, wasn’t a rare occurrence. As a matter of fact, Watanuki dreamt more often than any other person he knew, although his dreams weren’t quite living up to his expectations as of late. Dreams, he believed, were something one had when asleep. Dreams were something that didn’t dictate what was going to happen during your waking hours. Dreams were not places where you lost your glasses, forcing you to rely on the sight of a borrowed eye to be able to handle normal life. Dreams were not places where dead people, long gone, cheerfully advised the living on how to deal with their spoiled grandchildren. Dreams were certainly not places one was abducted to in the middle of the evening, with no prior warning, when you were still clutching a bag with food and a flask of tea and ready to scream bloody murder at your rival. Dreams were not places one was abducted to together with said rival.
Those, he called nightmares.
He was currently in one.
How else, then, could you explain the fact that he was now in a non-descript place that could be anywhere and yet was nowhere, alone save for the never-welcome presence of Doumeki? Who, by the way, was looking rather like an idiot to Watanuki, staring slowly around himself and clutching an ugly-looking cloth bag in his left hand. Who the hell carries ugly cloth bags around in the middle of the evening, anyway?
“We are not outside that woman’s shop anymore.”
No shit.
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Where are we?”
Watanuki didn’t answer. He just crossed his arms, his own, much more dignified-looking bag dangling from one of his hands and glared at nowhere in particular. Like he was going to tell Doumeki that they were in one of his dreams... no, scratch that, nightmares.
Watanuki stopped for a second to scrutinize that train of thought as though it were a particularly disgusting kind of insect that had crawled into his kitchen. If he had fallen suddenly asleep in the middle of the street -like he had done a couple of times already- then why was Doumeki with him? So far, he had always appeared alone... save for that time Sakura and Syaoran had shown up, but that didn’t count as they weren’t supposed to be in this world, right?
Watanuki chanced a small glance in the direction of Doumeki, who was still looking around, apparently trying to find out where they were.
Maybe this was Haruka-san playing a trick on him?
The Doumeki next to him chose that particular moment to stop looking around and fix his gaze upon Watanuki’s bag.
“I’m hungry. Is that food?”
Nope. Definitely the moronic grandson.
“If it were, what makes you think I’d give it to you?”
Doumeki, without answering, took Watanuki’s bag from his hand.
Watanuki raised imaginary hackles at the sheer nerve of the guy.
“Don’t you dare touch that! That’s my dinner!”
Doumeki looked up from inspecting the contents of the bag, an accusatory look in his face.
“There’s only roasted fish in here.”
“Shut up! There’s only roasted fish in there because that’s all that managed to survive the attack of the bottomless pits that are Yuuko and the black bun! You have no right to complain!”
Whatever complaints he may have as for the nature of the food, however, Doumeki was already sitting on the floor and starting on the roasted fish.
“Tea.”
...and having the nerve to ask him to pour him tea, too!
“It wouldn’t kill you to pour your own tea from time to time, you lazy jerk! Besides which, who the heck stops to munch on roasted fish and slurp tea when they find themselves mysteriously abducted to the middle of nowhere?”
Doumeki looked up from his fish, looking uninterestedly at Watanuki.
“Somebody who’s hungry? And it’s not like there’s anything better to do.”
“What about trying to find a way out?”
“You do that. I’m eating.”
“I can see that, thank you very much!”
“You’re welcome. Before you go, don’t forget to pour my tea.”
“YOU CAN POUR YOUR OWN TEA!”
Clearly, life was not done making him suffer for the day. As if it hadn’t been cruel enough to him, now it was enlisting Doumeki’s help to add to his workload!
Watanuki took one of the paper cups rather fiercely out of the bag and filled it to the brim with the scalding hot tea from the thermos.
I hope you burn your tongue with the hot tea, you jerk.
Watanuki stopped for a second and came to the decision there was no reason to keep that beautiful thought to himself.
“I hope you burn your tongue with the hot tea, you jerk!”
Doumeki barely threw him a glance as he took the proffered cup of tea from Watanuki’s hand.
“Idiot.”
“What did you just call me?”
Doumeki was struck with a sense of déjà vu as he sipped his tea and... yes, burnt his tongue with the hot tea.
“It’s hot.”
“Hah! Serves you right!”
Feeling slightly better about the world at large, Watanuki sat down on the floor -or rather the non-descript stuff that was underneath his feet- and poured himself a cup of tea as well.
He glared at Doumeki. It figures that the jerk would gobble down his dinner without even a word of thanks. Was the jerk even able to appreciate how much trouble went into making the food he inhaled without so much as a by your leave?
Doumeki, oblivious to Watanuki’s furious train of thought, kept tucking in to the ridiculously-expensive and nearly-impossible-to-get roasted fish Yuuko and Mokona had neglected to eat during the impromptu party that night.
Whatever Watanuki may think about him, Doumeki was somebody who took his food seriously. After all, he had grown up listening to his grandfather telling him stories about the food shortage after the war, and had early on in his life decided he was not going to waste even a grain of rice, if it could be helped.
Besides, it didn’t seem like they were in any immediate danger considering Watanuki wasn’t flailing around and screaming at empty air, and whatever they may have to face, wouldn’t it be better to face it on a full stomach?
One could say that Doumeki Shizuka had a very simple way of looking at life, one that so far only the weird antics of a certain over-excitable and overreacting teenager had been able to challenge... or at least nag to long enough to make it want to be able to plug its ears so as not to have to listen to the whining any more. Unfortunately, simplistic views of life aren’t really equipped to do such a thing and his were forced to endure the onslaught every time he was in the company of said teenager.
After being repeatedly exposed to such fierce assaults to their simplistic-ness, they had had to choose between changing and dying as the only possible means to escape the torture.
The first to go was Doumeki’s innate lack of curiosity. After all, it was practically impossible to watch the display of at least twenty different expressions battling to take supremacy over Watanuki’s face and not feel at least slightly curious as to what could be causing such a confrontation.
When his lack of curiosity had given up its life, other ways of regarding life had followed... not very important ones and never without a fight, but all of them absolutely fed up at their owner’s insistence on being near the cause for their demise.
The last one to succumb, after a long and gruesome battle, was Doumeki’s deeply ingrained notion that anybody’s business was their own, and had nothing to do with him. That one had finally perished when he had awoken from a rather pleasant dream carrying the unmistakeable signs of having shared physical intimacy with somebody despite having been nowhere near anybody at the time when said intimacy was supposed to have taken place.
At first, he had tried to dismiss it as unimportant, but even without straining his memory, he couldn’t help but notice that the events that had taken place in his dream, had they taken place in real life, would have left marks in his body in uncannily the same places the marks he was currently sporting were.
Any other person, had they been faced with Doumeki’s predicament, would have waved their sanity goodbye and voluntarily secluded themselves in an asylum, but Doumeki knew better. This whole affair smelled supernatural to him, and he didn’t have to go very far to find the source of most things supernatural within his life.
In fact, he didn’t have to go farther than the boy sitting a few feet from him, slurping tea noisily in what seemed to be some kind of protest and mumbling angrily to himself.
The funerary pyre for that particular view of life had been lit when he remembered it had been this very same mumbling person that had appeared in his dream, and that this person had been acting stranger than usual for the entire day.
Doumeki Shizuka was a very calm person. He had been brought up to be that way. Ever since he could remember, he had been taught how to control his emotions, how to measure his words, his actions, even his thoughts. Nothing was to be done in excess. Life, because it was such a precious gift, had to be lived sparingly, carefully, and deliberately.
Archery had only re-enforced that notion. You only get one chance, so don’t waste it. Make it worth it. A shot arrow never returns; you never get the chance to shoot it again. So aim carefully before you let the arrow fly.
In that way, he had learnt to take his time to make up his mind, and once he did, to stick with his decision all the way.
That was why it had taken Doumeki the entire day to take the decision to approach the weird boy about his nagging suspicions regarding his strange dream but now that he had, he was determined not to back down until he had extracted satisfactory answers from the other party involved.
That was why he had wound up outside Yuuko’s shop, waiting for the boy to come out. He decided his chances to extract an answer out of the guy were slightly better without the distracting presence of the witch and the black bun around. Thus, he had waited until Watanuki had finished work and left the shop.
He hadn’t let the change in surroundings immediately following the boy’s appearance affect his decision to interrogate him; it had simply made him postpone it for later. At least until he had finished eating, something he did soon enough.
“Gochisousama.”
Watanuki glared at Doumeki when he heard those words. There was no way somebody who ate that fast could taste properly what he was eating, he decided. He had barely managed to drink his tea in the time it had taken Doumeki to finish all the fish and drink his tea.
So busy had Watanuki been mentally criticizing Doumeki’s table manners -or lack thereof- that he was completely unprepared for the following words that came out of the annoying boy’s mouth.
“What are you hiding?”
Watanuki jumped in his place when he heard that question.
“What makes you think I’m hiding anything?”
Doumeki stared at Watanuki. The weird guy was tense, and was refusing to meet his eyes, choosing to glare at a point some feet to his left instead. It was obvious from his demeanour that he wasn’t going to be able to extract direct answers to his questions. With a mental sigh, he decided to take the long way around. Mercifully this place gave Watanuki no place to run.
“You know where we are, don’t you?”
Watanuki relaxed noticeably at his words, which answered quite plainly a question Doumeki had implied in the first one. Watanuki was hiding something, and he didn’t want Doumeki asking about it. In fact, Watanuki was so relieved to be asked that, that he forgot his previous determination not to let on to the golden-eyed boy that they were currently sharing a trip to dream -nightmare- land.
“I’m not really sure but I think... we are in a dream.”
Doumeki considered that notion for a second. He looked around himself a couple of times, taking in the lack of light, the absence of people, the unnerving silence and the seemingly insubstantial objects around them. He had noticed them before, but hadn’t paid much attention then. Now that he did, he realized that the more he tried to focus his sight on something, the more that thing seemed to change shape and turn into a different, equally unidentifiable thing. It sort of made sense, only...
“If this is a dream, it doesn’t seem to be a very happy one.”
“Of course it isn’t! You’re in it, so it isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare!”
After all the effort Yuuko put into teaching Watanuki the importance of words, one would think he would have known better than to label that dream as a nightmare so quickly. Words have the power to affect people and change realities. Normally the change is slight, as there are too many people speaking and shaping reality to make a single word matter much in the whole. However, this was not reality, not as it is normally perceived. This was a different reality, a world all on itself. Dreams, after all, depend on the dreamer to shape them, consciously or otherwise, and so their words take on a very different relevance there than in the waking world.
Oblivious to this, Watanuki wasn’t inclined to pay much attention to what he said on account of having Doumeki right in front of him looking at him in that irritatingly blank way and daring to question him. Not that it would have mattered in the long run. In fact, he would have to have been exceptionally attentive to be able to notice that as soon as those words left his mouth, something shifted in the darkness. After that very, very subtle shift in the darkness, something began to change, but slowly, so very slowly and so gradually, that it was a while before Watanuki began to feel its effects, and a while longer yet before he could recognize them for what they truly were. What was done couldn’t now be undone, and he would have to face the consequences.
In the meantime, he was busy glaring at Doumeki and answering his questions with as much sting as he could, which we are sorry to say, wasn’t much. He was too relieved at not being asked what had happened the previous night again.
“Are your dreams usually this real?”
Watanuki grumbled, but decided there was no use trying to deny it.
“Not all of them. Most of my dreams are quite normal, but some of them are even more realistic than this one.”
“You told me that you’ve seen my grandfather in a dream a couple of times. Do you meet him often?”
“Not often, but sometimes.”
Doumeki looked around again, as if hoping to see his smiling grandfather pop in from a hole in the darkness.
“He’s not here, if that’s what you are looking for.”
Watanuki placed his empty paper cup in his bag and rubbed his hands together. For an early-summer night, it was getting awfully chilly in that place. He supposed that he couldn’t expect to have his dreams be consistent with reality’s weather, when they obviously hadn’t bothered to be in other areas. Like his sexual preferences, or his sense of decorum, or his general likes and dislikes of people, for instance, seeing as to how they had provided him last night with jerk Doumeki instead of cute Himawari-chan for a dream partner. Watanuki made a mental note to find someone to complain to regarding this matter as soon as he left his current nightmare.
Of all the people to be stuck in a nightmare with, it had to be Doumeki.
A small, weak, and timid part of Watanuki’s mind tried to argue that that wasn’t necessarily bad, in fact, it was a pretty good thing considering the guy had spirit repellent properties, but the biggest, nastiest, loudest, most anti-Doumeki part of his brain shut it up with a brutal kick and a ferocious half-nelson.
Doumeki was looking at him again, apparently having resigned himself that he wasn’t about to meet his grandfather there.
“How much control do you have over your dreams?”
Another, more cautious part of Watanuki’s mind tried to warn him that it didn’t like the course this conversation was taking and that it would be wise to change the topic soon, but couldn’t be made itself heard over the loud victory yells issuing from the main stream of Watanuki’s thoughts, currently overjoyed at having successfully beaten up the insolent half-thought of Doumeki appreciation. Eventually, the cautious part of his mind just gave up, which caused Watanuki to find no reason not to answer with another question.
“What do you mean by control?”
“Can you choose what your dreams are about?”
Watanuki hugged himself to fend off the cold and considered pouring himself another cup of tea before answering.
“No.”
“Can you choose what happens in those dreams?”
Watanuki had a fleeting memory of being chased by hand-shaped ayakashi, and when he answered, it was in a very emphatic manner, shivering slightly from what he could only assume was residual fear.
“No.”
“Can you choose who appears in the dreams?”
Watanuki sighed miserably, remembering last night’s dream.
“No.”
“Can you control what those people do?”
Once again, he was reminded of last night’s dream, and he shook himself mentally before answering. The last thing he needed was to bring back those images to the forefront of his mind again... although they probably would help him shake off the cold.
“Definitely not.”
“Can you control what you do in the dreams?”
Watanuki thought about it for a second but the cautious part of his mind was still sulking at being ignored and refusing to talk to him, so he decided to answer with the truth.
“About as much as I can control what I do in real life.”
“Was it in one of these realistic dreams where you left your glasses?”
Watanuki nodded, and couldn’t help noticing that Doumeki was looking oddly satisfied about something. All kinds of alarms started going off in Watanuki’s mind. Clearly nothing good could come out of Doumeki feeling pleased about anything. Something was fishy about this.
Unfortunately, Watanuki was getting too distracted by the cold now to care much what Doumeki was asking about, or the answers he was giving in return, no matter how many alarms were blaring off in his mind. He poured himself a second cup of tea and felt disappointed at how fast it grew cold when he tried to warm his hands with the cup.
That was the only reason he answered like he did when Doumeki fired away the most important of his questions.
“Have you met anybody else besides my grandfather in your dreams?”
“Yeah. Generally it’s Yuuko-san, but I’ve met a childhood friend a couple of times.” A dead childhood friend, but Doumeki didn’t need to know that. Watanuki continued, counting with his fingers as he enumerated. “Sakura and Syaoran, the girl with the bells and you.”
“Me?”
Watanuki realized how stupid he had been in mentioning that when Doumeki looked like he had found the answer he had been looking for all along. The cautious part of his mind ‘hmph’-ed in an ‘I-told-you-so’ way and crossed its arms, enjoying Watanuki’s discomfort immensely and refusing to cooperate now that its help was desperately needed.
Watanuki started babbling at high speed, desperately describing a dream he had had a while back, definitely not the one he had had the previous night, in the hopes that Doumeki would think that was the only one of his dreams in which he had made a guest appearance.
“We were fishing but we couldn’t catch anything so we went to find a place to rest for the night but once we did we were attacked and chased by women who weren’t really women but...”
“Birds,” the other boy supplied. “And I distracted them by throwing the fish bait so we could escape.”
Watanuki gaped, his mind now full of a nasty kind of buzz that didn’t let him think properly. He hadn’t told anybody about this dream before, not even Himawari-chan.
“How the hell did you know that?”
Is he a mind reader, after all?
“Because I had the same dream too, not so long ago. So I was just sharing one of your realistic dreams... no wonder I woke up with a funny smell in my hands that morning. That was just the fish bait.”
Watanuki could feel destiny laughing at him when the other boy looked straight at him and asked, in what seemed to be his normal tone of voice but that to him sounded cavernous, mocking and cruel, “What did you dream about last night?”
Panic, sheer, blinding panic, flooded his mind and left his mouth in a shriek.
“Why would you care what I dreamt about last night?”
Doumeki seemed on the verge of answering for a moment, but then raised a hand to tug at the collar of his shirt instead, exposing the skin of his neck and part of his chest.
Watanuki stared dumbly for a second before he noticed what it was Doumeki was trying to show him: a coin-shaped, rosy-coloured bruise, right where the neck and the shoulder met. Even Watanuki could tell at a glance what that bruise really was, even if his mind was refusing point-blank to call it by its proper name.
...although it did supply him, and quite readily at that, with a flash of his dream that would explain how that particular brand of bruise got to be in Doumeki’s neck in the first place, and who had left it there.
So much for trying to keep those images out of the forefront of his mind...
A fresh wave of panic coursed through him at the possibility -looking more feasible every second- that last night’s dreams had been more than a simple dream, after all.
He hastily tried to stand up, ready to defend his honour and his dignity from this horribly cruel joke destiny and Doumeki were playing on him, but found that his legs were by now so stiff by the cold that he only succeeded in tripping and falling in an undignified heap to the floor.
Confused, he tried again with similar results. It was then that he recognized the cold for what it was, when he looked at Doumeki and noticed that the guy wasn’t even shivering.
He had felt that kind of cold only once before, in the Lady of the Spiders’ lair.
He had labelled this dream as a nightmare, and so he was about to face the consequences of such an action by having an unseen, extremely powerful ayakashi attack him and try to eat him.
The monsters that plagued his nightmares were usually much, much worse than the ones he could find when awake, since they were sort of a collection of the worst features of each of the ayakashi he had encountered.
Among those, what had scared him the most was the Lady of the Spiders’ cold, as it was something he couldn’t fight. Bad smells were annoying but harmless, nausea he could tolerate and he never sustained heavy damage from fainting, but that unnatural cold that had threatened to plunge him into a dreamless sleep from which he would never wake up had managed to worm its way to the top three of his ‘worst things that an ayakashi can do to me’ list, right next to eating and possessing.
Normally, this wouldn’t be so worrisome, as, in typical nightmare fashion, he would wake up before things got really nasty. Usually his nightmares involved being chased for a while, tripping, and waking up before the ayakashi had made up its mind where it was going to start eating him by.
He had already done the tripping, so he curled up in a shivering ball on the floor, glaring at Doumeki and daring him to laugh at his predicament, hoping that the ayakashi would show up soon so that he could wake up and avoid having to admit anything to the annoying guy.
However, an unsuspected problem had popped into existence as his dreams got gradually more real. Watanuki hadn’t had a nightmare in a long time, so he hadn’t yet realized that in the same way as the actions in his dreams affected his waking self, anything that happened in a nightmare would equally have consequences once he woke up.
Blissfully ignorant of the seriousness of the situation, Watanuki only proceeded to glare at Doumeki as the jerk finally seemed to notice that something very wrong was happening to him.
He watched as the guy stood up and ran towards him, looking sharply around, trying to spot the source of his discomfort.
It didn’t take him long to find it, as in that very same instant, an ayakashi in the shape of a fine mist materialized all around Watanuki’s lying figure, growing denser and intensifying the effect it had on the boy by the second.
Watanuki couldn’t help but think with some irony that at least this situation had managed to dissuade Doumeki from asking anymore questions or flashing him anymore bruises of dubious virtue.
Watanuki was shivering violently from the cold by now, his hands and feet numb, his teeth chattering despite his very best efforts to make them behave. It was humiliating to be there on the floor, curled up on himself, suffering from the intense cold while the jerk felt nothing at all and just kept looking at him like that.
Watanuki looked up from his position at Doumeki, who was standing next to him, staring fixedly at him. Watanuki was so confused, so humiliated and so ashamed from the night’s revelations, that it looked to him as though Doumeki was gloating at his misery.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As a matter of fact, at that moment Doumeki’s mind was working like mad, trying to push out the guilt of being so caught up in their conversation that he hadn’t realized something was wrong with Watanuki until it was painfully obvious. He had noticed Watanuki had seemed distracted while they talked and he had been surprised at the usually spazzing teenager’s lack of reluctance to answer his questions, but to think that this had been the reason... He forcefully drove those thoughts out of his mind. He knew that guilt was useless, and he couldn’t allow himself to dwell in it if he was to find a way to free the shivering boy from the clutches of the ayakashi he could barely see as a thin mist. He didn’t have his bow, and his bag... he wouldn’t be able to use the contents by himself. It wasn’t finished, after all... Would it work if he attacked the ayakashi with his bare hands? Would his ‘cleansing aura’ as Yuuko called it, be effective even without a medium to transfer it? Maybe he would chance the bag, anyway. He wanted, needed to help, but what if he actually made the problem worse?
Watanuki knew nothing of these thoughts, though, so he just looked up in anger at Doumeki and spoke, his words coming so bitter, and so intense, that they sounded very much like a curse.
“It would be nice,” said Watanuki, forcing the words through his chattering teeth, “if the ayakashi latched to you instead of me, for a change.”
For many years to come, Watanuki would regret having said those words. He had meant them as nothing more than a way to erase that annoyingly blank look out of Doumeki’s face. He certainly hadn’t meant them to cause what happened immediately after uttering them.
Because what happened after those words left his mouth, born out of his frustration, his confusion, his shame, was that the cloud that had started to gather slowly around himself left him completely... only to surround Doumeki instead.
He felt only a second of gleeful triumph, during which he actually quite enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t feeling so cold any longer, and that Doumeki would, for once, learn what it meant to be stalked and annoyed by ayakashi no matter what he did to avoid it.
After the second was over, however, he quickly discovered what a disgusting, evil thought that had been, when he noticed that the ayakashi was having a radically different effect on Doumeki than it had had on him.
Instead of shivering with cold and curling up in a little ball like he had, like he imagined the infuriating guy would, Doumeki actually stumbled, face locked in a grimace of pain and surprise, hands clawing at his own chest. It didn’t take Watanuki long to realize what was happening. The ayakashi had gone for Doumeki’s lungs, and was slowly choking him to death.
The reason for this was simple, yet no less serious for that. While Watanuki’s nightmares involved being unable to escape one of the many ayakashi that tried to eat him on a daily basis, Doumeki’s worst nightmare occurrence was going back to a time when he had been so weak physically that the most innocent allergy-induced asthma attack could degenerate into a mortal threat. His parents hadn’t chosen to dress their only son in kimono meant for a girl because of how cute he looked in them. They had done so in a desperate bid to save his life.
Suddenly Watanuki felt a different kind of cold washing over him.
This couldn’t be happening. It simply couldn’t.
He watched, horror-struck, as Doumeki fell to his knees, mouth opening and closing in an effort to bring air into his lungs, horrible choking noises issuing from his throat. Then slowly, so very slowly, Doumeki fell forward, supporting his weight with one arm against the floor, the other reaching for something that was too far from him to get.
For the space of several seconds or several days, Watanuki simple watched as Doumeki’s face turned slightly red, then purple, and then slowly began to pale. His mind felt sluggish, locked in horror at the scenes playing in front of his eyes, stupidly telling himself that this was definitely one of the worst nightmares he had had, and hoping he would wake up soon.
After those seconds or days were over, however, his mind started working so fast and so furiously that all movement seemed to slow down to almost nothing.
If this was a nightmare -no doubts about that- and it was following the logic of his other dreams, then whatever happened inside it would happen in the real world too. Which was to say if he didn’t do anything to help Doumeki... if he didn’t...
A feeling of complete hopelessness came over Watanuki when the whole truth struck him, the whole, horrible truth that, adept as he was at attracting spirits, he was totally powerless when it came to driving them away. That was Doumeki’s and Yuuko’s expertise, not his. He had no means to answer Doumeki’s silent plea for help when the suffering young man raised his gaze from the floor, looking at him straight in the eye, those horrible, horrible choking noises still issuing from his mouth.
Watanuki had never felt so helpless in his entire life.
He was used to being attacked by whatever supernatural beings there were in a hundred meter radius, he was used to being the one that suffered from strange afflictions that had nothing to do with normal sicknesses, and lately, he had even started to get used to being the one being rescued all the time, but never before had he been in a situation when he was actually expected to help rescue someone else, someone important to him, without any sort of advice or reassurance that he could do a good job of it. Yuuko-san wasn’t there, Haruka-san wasn’t there. He didn’t have the kudakitsune with him, heck; he didn’t even have Mokona to help him. He was alone with the knowledge that one of the most important people in his life -whether he wanted to admit it or not- was going to die right in front of him, because of him, and he would be unable to do anything to stop it.
It was terrifying, overwhelming, unbearable. He had to help, he had to do something, anything. He couldn’t... he simply couldn’t stay there as Doumeki was slowly being choked to death. He had to at least try... even if it probably wouldn’t help at all. It was then, as he forced himself to drag his eyes away from Doumeki’s face, that he paid attention for the first time to the motions Doumeki was doing with his free arm. Stupidly, he looked to where the flailing arm was trying to reach, and his eyes finally discovered a shape several feet away from them. It was the ugly cloth bag he had noticed Doumeki was carrying when they had been abducted into this, his worst nightmare.
Desperately, Watanuki began to run towards Doumeki’s bag and wondered what he was supposed to do. Toss it at Doumeki? Hit the ayakashi with it? What was so special about that bag, anyway?
And how the hell was he supposed to stay calm enough to devise a plan of action when the other guy was making those horrible, horrible choking noises? When he couldn’t get the image of his suffering face out of his mind? When he could barely breathe himself through the huge lump in his throat?
In what seemed like an eternity, Watanuki reached the bag, and as soon as he touched it he noticed something was strange. The bag felt weird. It felt warm. It felt clean.
He yanked it open and his eyes immediately found what the source of that warmth and cleanness was. It was a bag of salt.
He immediately grabbed it and ran back to Doumeki, determined but scared, so very scared. What if it didn’t work? Salt only worked with minor ayakashi, never with the big, evil type that was currently slowly choking Doumeki to death. He knew, he had tried enough times.
Watanuki was running so fast his legs were protesting at the effort. It was only a very short distance to cover, so why did it seem like he was never getting close enough? Why couldn’t he stop staring at Doumeki’s writhing shape, his face blue, his hands clawing at the floor in spasmodic motions, his pleading eyes fixed on him? Why did the sight hurt so much?
In a single fluid motion, Watanuki grabbed both of the bag’s handles, turned, and threw it at the ayakashi, praying desperately that he wouldn’t miss, that it would work, that the thing would leave Doumeki alone.
The bag, pouring salt from the mouth, plunged straight to the middle of the now very dense-looking mist.
A deafening shriek.
A flash of light.
The ayakashi was gone.
Doumeki, free, started coughing violently, taking huge shuddering gulps of air in between coughs. He was free, he was fine, he was breathing, he was alive.
Watanuki, without even realizing what he was doing, slumped to the floor and started to tremble violently. He was alive. Doumeki was alive.
It was too much for him. The sudden release of tension, the huge waves of relief coursing through his body coupled with the overwhelming guilt and the last effects of the ayakashi’s presence took their toll on his weakened body.
He barely managed to turn away from Doumeki before the first wave of overpowering nausea hit him. He threw up, hacking and coughing almost as violently as the other boy, and it seemed to take forever to empty his stomach, but when he was done, he felt better.
He was still trembling from head to toes, dangerously close to tears, and wallowing in a pool of self-loathing, but he felt better. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and jumped when he felt a hand touch him gently on the back.
“Are you alright?”
Doumeki was wearing such a strange look on his face that it took Watanuki a second to identify it. Concern. The idiot had been this close to death and he was still finding time to be concerned about him, who had caused Doumeki to be in that predicament in the first place. Watanuki wasn’t sure if he wanted to strangle the other boy, scream himself silly at the sheer idiocy of the guy, or start crying for all it was worth. He compromised by taking the cup of tea Doumeki was holding in his outstretched hand and rinsing his mouth, glad to be able to get rid of the nasty aftertaste of vomit.
When he had calmed down enough to trust himself not to scream, he answered.
“Are you?”
Doumeki shrugged.
“Now I am, thanks to you.”
And now he was thanking him. Watanuki felt anger rising in him uncontrollably and he couldn’t take it anymore. He exploded.
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you being so nice? It was me who threw that ayakashi at you! You could have been killed! You almost were! Why aren’t you angry at me? Why aren’t you yelling? It was my fault!”
He was so angry he couldn’t even scream properly. He hated how weak and pathetic his voice sounded, more like a whine than a proper scream.
He had crushed the paper cup in his hand, and now he was trembling worse than ever.
Doumeki just kept looking at him with that alien concerned expression. When he answered, it was in his normal, even voice, with his simple, straight-forward and blunt brand of logic.
“I can’t be angry at you because I’m too glad you are alive.”
He couldn’t meet Doumeki’s eyes. He couldn’t look directly at those golden eyes, they were so damn gentle. It wasn’t normal, Doumeki wasn’t supposed to look like that; he wasn’t supposed to be able to feel anything that would cause his face to look like that, to make him look at him like that.
The fact that he was, only made him feel worse at the possibility, so very real only a few moments before, that Doumeki could have stopped being altogether, all because of him.
“You saved me.”
Watanuki was startled from his thoughts by this declaration, startled and shaken. Why couldn’t the guy have the decency to be properly angry at him? It would have been so much easier that way...
“From a situation I got you into in the first place.”
He would have wanted to sound angry when saying that. He would have wanted to yell or scream, but for some reason only managed a pathetic, strangled sort of guilty whine.
“But you saved me.”
He found no retort to give this time.
“Why?” The voice, deep and soft, was calm, like he was inquiring about nothing more trivial than the weather.
Why? He could have answered automatically that it was because that was the normal thing for anybody to do. That he would have done the same thing for anybody else. He could even have said that it was guilt that drove him, in an effort not to have the guy’s death on his conscience.
But he knew that none of those had been the reason.
If he was going to be honest with himself, perhaps for the first time, Watanuki would have to admit that he had saved Doumeki because he had been afraid, simply afraid.
The sole idea that Doumeki could disappear from his life had hurt too much, too deeply, and it had made him afraid, way too afraid.
He had once lost the two most important people in his life when his parents had been snatched from him when he was still a child. He didn’t want to go through the same thing again. Never again. And if that meant stomping on his pride and admitting that Doumeki was way too dear to him to be able to stand losing him, then that’s what he would do.
Watanuki covered his face with his hands, tears streaming out of his eyes now, brow scrunched up as if in pain, ashamed of the anguished sobs that were escaping his mouth, that made his words sound too weak, too distorted, too pathetic.
“I saved you because I didn’t want you to disappear.”
Was this how Doumeki had felt? Was this how it had felt to watch him be attacked and get hurt, once and again, closer to death every time? Was this why Doumeki had been willing to sacrifice so much, even risking being hated, being loathed, just to keep him alive?
And how had he repaid him? By being angry, rude, ungrateful, always suspecting him of the worst. By insulting him every available opportunity, avoiding him at all costs, complaining loudly every time they had been alone together, every time the guy had come along when he had wanted to be with Himawari-chan, even though he knew that Doumeki’s presence was the only thing stopping him from being affected too badly by her condition. The guy had even had the tact never to mention it, though it would have been perfectly in his right to do so.
He had repaid him by causing an ayakashi to attack and nearly kill him.
Pride be damned, it wasn’t Doumeki who had always been in the wrong.
The guy was annoying, bad-mannered, blunt, shameless and infuriatingly inexpressive, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t be a good friend. In fact, he had never been anything but.
Ever since they met, Watanuki hadn’t even had a chance to get lonely, because the guy had always been there.
Annoying him, being rude to him, pissing him off, practically stalking him, but he had been there every time he had needed company, there to protect him even though he did nothing to deserve it, there to help him understand with his bluntness that he wasn’t alone, that there were people who would go to any lengths to ensure that he was alive, and well, and happy.
And that he was one of them. Not because Watanuki deserved it, but because Doumeki had chosen to be.
Watanuki didn’t know how long he remained where he was, sitting on the floor, crying harder than he had in years, his entire body shaking with the intensity of his shame, his pain and his guilt. He only knew that Doumeki never left his side, and never tried to say anything, neither in answer to his declaration nor to dissuade him from crying.
He was grateful to him for that. He didn’t think he could have taken it if Doumeki had tried to comfort him or if he had asked him to explain himself further.
It felt like an eternity later when his tears finally slowed, his sobs subsided and he started feeling very foolish indeed, sitting on the floor while Doumeki watched him sniffle.
Watanuki dried his face forcefully with his hands and tried his best to make his voice sound normal when he spoke.
“We should be looking for a way to get back.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Watanuki snapped his head up in surprise at these words, and stared at Doumeki, who was standing at his side, offering a hand to help him stand up.
“We’re back already.”
That’s it for chapter three, people.
click here to go to chapter four
Please remember that feedback of any kind is highly appreciated. :)
In case you missed them, here is chapter one and chapter two.
Glossary and cultural notes:
Gouchisousama: ‘It was a feast’. Japanese people say this when they finish eating. Companion to this phrase is ‘Itadakimasu’ (I receive this), which is said before starting to eat, though Doumeki rarely ever says it. Both are a way of saying your thanks for the food and a compliment to the one who made it.
Regarding salt: In Japan, salt is supposed to chase away evil, and is typically used in purification rituals. That’s why you will sometimes see anime characters throwing salt when they meet a disagreeable person; they are actually implying that person is a demon or an evil spirit, which is pretty insulting no matter how you look at it.
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: After longer than I thought it would take, I finally managed to fix some things from this chapter I was never very happy about. It should read better now, so thanks for your patience! Once again, thanks to my wonderful betas
beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their invaluable help.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Watanuki dreamt. It has already been established that that, in itself, wasn’t a rare occurrence. As a matter of fact, Watanuki dreamt more often than any other person he knew, although his dreams weren’t quite living up to his expectations as of late. Dreams, he believed, were something one had when asleep. Dreams were something that didn’t dictate what was going to happen during your waking hours. Dreams were not places where you lost your glasses, forcing you to rely on the sight of a borrowed eye to be able to handle normal life. Dreams were not places where dead people, long gone, cheerfully advised the living on how to deal with their spoiled grandchildren. Dreams were certainly not places one was abducted to in the middle of the evening, with no prior warning, when you were still clutching a bag with food and a flask of tea and ready to scream bloody murder at your rival. Dreams were not places one was abducted to together with said rival.
Those, he called nightmares.
He was currently in one.
How else, then, could you explain the fact that he was now in a non-descript place that could be anywhere and yet was nowhere, alone save for the never-welcome presence of Doumeki? Who, by the way, was looking rather like an idiot to Watanuki, staring slowly around himself and clutching an ugly-looking cloth bag in his left hand. Who the hell carries ugly cloth bags around in the middle of the evening, anyway?
“We are not outside that woman’s shop anymore.”
No shit.
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Where are we?”
Watanuki didn’t answer. He just crossed his arms, his own, much more dignified-looking bag dangling from one of his hands and glared at nowhere in particular. Like he was going to tell Doumeki that they were in one of his dreams... no, scratch that, nightmares.
Watanuki stopped for a second to scrutinize that train of thought as though it were a particularly disgusting kind of insect that had crawled into his kitchen. If he had fallen suddenly asleep in the middle of the street -like he had done a couple of times already- then why was Doumeki with him? So far, he had always appeared alone... save for that time Sakura and Syaoran had shown up, but that didn’t count as they weren’t supposed to be in this world, right?
Watanuki chanced a small glance in the direction of Doumeki, who was still looking around, apparently trying to find out where they were.
Maybe this was Haruka-san playing a trick on him?
The Doumeki next to him chose that particular moment to stop looking around and fix his gaze upon Watanuki’s bag.
“I’m hungry. Is that food?”
Nope. Definitely the moronic grandson.
“If it were, what makes you think I’d give it to you?”
Doumeki, without answering, took Watanuki’s bag from his hand.
Watanuki raised imaginary hackles at the sheer nerve of the guy.
“Don’t you dare touch that! That’s my dinner!”
Doumeki looked up from inspecting the contents of the bag, an accusatory look in his face.
“There’s only roasted fish in here.”
“Shut up! There’s only roasted fish in there because that’s all that managed to survive the attack of the bottomless pits that are Yuuko and the black bun! You have no right to complain!”
Whatever complaints he may have as for the nature of the food, however, Doumeki was already sitting on the floor and starting on the roasted fish.
“Tea.”
...and having the nerve to ask him to pour him tea, too!
“It wouldn’t kill you to pour your own tea from time to time, you lazy jerk! Besides which, who the heck stops to munch on roasted fish and slurp tea when they find themselves mysteriously abducted to the middle of nowhere?”
Doumeki looked up from his fish, looking uninterestedly at Watanuki.
“Somebody who’s hungry? And it’s not like there’s anything better to do.”
“What about trying to find a way out?”
“You do that. I’m eating.”
“I can see that, thank you very much!”
“You’re welcome. Before you go, don’t forget to pour my tea.”
“YOU CAN POUR YOUR OWN TEA!”
Clearly, life was not done making him suffer for the day. As if it hadn’t been cruel enough to him, now it was enlisting Doumeki’s help to add to his workload!
Watanuki took one of the paper cups rather fiercely out of the bag and filled it to the brim with the scalding hot tea from the thermos.
I hope you burn your tongue with the hot tea, you jerk.
Watanuki stopped for a second and came to the decision there was no reason to keep that beautiful thought to himself.
“I hope you burn your tongue with the hot tea, you jerk!”
Doumeki barely threw him a glance as he took the proffered cup of tea from Watanuki’s hand.
“Idiot.”
“What did you just call me?”
Doumeki was struck with a sense of déjà vu as he sipped his tea and... yes, burnt his tongue with the hot tea.
“It’s hot.”
“Hah! Serves you right!”
Feeling slightly better about the world at large, Watanuki sat down on the floor -or rather the non-descript stuff that was underneath his feet- and poured himself a cup of tea as well.
He glared at Doumeki. It figures that the jerk would gobble down his dinner without even a word of thanks. Was the jerk even able to appreciate how much trouble went into making the food he inhaled without so much as a by your leave?
Doumeki, oblivious to Watanuki’s furious train of thought, kept tucking in to the ridiculously-expensive and nearly-impossible-to-get roasted fish Yuuko and Mokona had neglected to eat during the impromptu party that night.
Whatever Watanuki may think about him, Doumeki was somebody who took his food seriously. After all, he had grown up listening to his grandfather telling him stories about the food shortage after the war, and had early on in his life decided he was not going to waste even a grain of rice, if it could be helped.
Besides, it didn’t seem like they were in any immediate danger considering Watanuki wasn’t flailing around and screaming at empty air, and whatever they may have to face, wouldn’t it be better to face it on a full stomach?
One could say that Doumeki Shizuka had a very simple way of looking at life, one that so far only the weird antics of a certain over-excitable and overreacting teenager had been able to challenge... or at least nag to long enough to make it want to be able to plug its ears so as not to have to listen to the whining any more. Unfortunately, simplistic views of life aren’t really equipped to do such a thing and his were forced to endure the onslaught every time he was in the company of said teenager.
After being repeatedly exposed to such fierce assaults to their simplistic-ness, they had had to choose between changing and dying as the only possible means to escape the torture.
The first to go was Doumeki’s innate lack of curiosity. After all, it was practically impossible to watch the display of at least twenty different expressions battling to take supremacy over Watanuki’s face and not feel at least slightly curious as to what could be causing such a confrontation.
When his lack of curiosity had given up its life, other ways of regarding life had followed... not very important ones and never without a fight, but all of them absolutely fed up at their owner’s insistence on being near the cause for their demise.
The last one to succumb, after a long and gruesome battle, was Doumeki’s deeply ingrained notion that anybody’s business was their own, and had nothing to do with him. That one had finally perished when he had awoken from a rather pleasant dream carrying the unmistakeable signs of having shared physical intimacy with somebody despite having been nowhere near anybody at the time when said intimacy was supposed to have taken place.
At first, he had tried to dismiss it as unimportant, but even without straining his memory, he couldn’t help but notice that the events that had taken place in his dream, had they taken place in real life, would have left marks in his body in uncannily the same places the marks he was currently sporting were.
Any other person, had they been faced with Doumeki’s predicament, would have waved their sanity goodbye and voluntarily secluded themselves in an asylum, but Doumeki knew better. This whole affair smelled supernatural to him, and he didn’t have to go very far to find the source of most things supernatural within his life.
In fact, he didn’t have to go farther than the boy sitting a few feet from him, slurping tea noisily in what seemed to be some kind of protest and mumbling angrily to himself.
The funerary pyre for that particular view of life had been lit when he remembered it had been this very same mumbling person that had appeared in his dream, and that this person had been acting stranger than usual for the entire day.
Doumeki Shizuka was a very calm person. He had been brought up to be that way. Ever since he could remember, he had been taught how to control his emotions, how to measure his words, his actions, even his thoughts. Nothing was to be done in excess. Life, because it was such a precious gift, had to be lived sparingly, carefully, and deliberately.
Archery had only re-enforced that notion. You only get one chance, so don’t waste it. Make it worth it. A shot arrow never returns; you never get the chance to shoot it again. So aim carefully before you let the arrow fly.
In that way, he had learnt to take his time to make up his mind, and once he did, to stick with his decision all the way.
That was why it had taken Doumeki the entire day to take the decision to approach the weird boy about his nagging suspicions regarding his strange dream but now that he had, he was determined not to back down until he had extracted satisfactory answers from the other party involved.
That was why he had wound up outside Yuuko’s shop, waiting for the boy to come out. He decided his chances to extract an answer out of the guy were slightly better without the distracting presence of the witch and the black bun around. Thus, he had waited until Watanuki had finished work and left the shop.
He hadn’t let the change in surroundings immediately following the boy’s appearance affect his decision to interrogate him; it had simply made him postpone it for later. At least until he had finished eating, something he did soon enough.
“Gochisousama.”
Watanuki glared at Doumeki when he heard those words. There was no way somebody who ate that fast could taste properly what he was eating, he decided. He had barely managed to drink his tea in the time it had taken Doumeki to finish all the fish and drink his tea.
So busy had Watanuki been mentally criticizing Doumeki’s table manners -or lack thereof- that he was completely unprepared for the following words that came out of the annoying boy’s mouth.
“What are you hiding?”
Watanuki jumped in his place when he heard that question.
“What makes you think I’m hiding anything?”
Doumeki stared at Watanuki. The weird guy was tense, and was refusing to meet his eyes, choosing to glare at a point some feet to his left instead. It was obvious from his demeanour that he wasn’t going to be able to extract direct answers to his questions. With a mental sigh, he decided to take the long way around. Mercifully this place gave Watanuki no place to run.
“You know where we are, don’t you?”
Watanuki relaxed noticeably at his words, which answered quite plainly a question Doumeki had implied in the first one. Watanuki was hiding something, and he didn’t want Doumeki asking about it. In fact, Watanuki was so relieved to be asked that, that he forgot his previous determination not to let on to the golden-eyed boy that they were currently sharing a trip to dream -nightmare- land.
“I’m not really sure but I think... we are in a dream.”
Doumeki considered that notion for a second. He looked around himself a couple of times, taking in the lack of light, the absence of people, the unnerving silence and the seemingly insubstantial objects around them. He had noticed them before, but hadn’t paid much attention then. Now that he did, he realized that the more he tried to focus his sight on something, the more that thing seemed to change shape and turn into a different, equally unidentifiable thing. It sort of made sense, only...
“If this is a dream, it doesn’t seem to be a very happy one.”
“Of course it isn’t! You’re in it, so it isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare!”
After all the effort Yuuko put into teaching Watanuki the importance of words, one would think he would have known better than to label that dream as a nightmare so quickly. Words have the power to affect people and change realities. Normally the change is slight, as there are too many people speaking and shaping reality to make a single word matter much in the whole. However, this was not reality, not as it is normally perceived. This was a different reality, a world all on itself. Dreams, after all, depend on the dreamer to shape them, consciously or otherwise, and so their words take on a very different relevance there than in the waking world.
Oblivious to this, Watanuki wasn’t inclined to pay much attention to what he said on account of having Doumeki right in front of him looking at him in that irritatingly blank way and daring to question him. Not that it would have mattered in the long run. In fact, he would have to have been exceptionally attentive to be able to notice that as soon as those words left his mouth, something shifted in the darkness. After that very, very subtle shift in the darkness, something began to change, but slowly, so very slowly and so gradually, that it was a while before Watanuki began to feel its effects, and a while longer yet before he could recognize them for what they truly were. What was done couldn’t now be undone, and he would have to face the consequences.
In the meantime, he was busy glaring at Doumeki and answering his questions with as much sting as he could, which we are sorry to say, wasn’t much. He was too relieved at not being asked what had happened the previous night again.
“Are your dreams usually this real?”
Watanuki grumbled, but decided there was no use trying to deny it.
“Not all of them. Most of my dreams are quite normal, but some of them are even more realistic than this one.”
“You told me that you’ve seen my grandfather in a dream a couple of times. Do you meet him often?”
“Not often, but sometimes.”
Doumeki looked around again, as if hoping to see his smiling grandfather pop in from a hole in the darkness.
“He’s not here, if that’s what you are looking for.”
Watanuki placed his empty paper cup in his bag and rubbed his hands together. For an early-summer night, it was getting awfully chilly in that place. He supposed that he couldn’t expect to have his dreams be consistent with reality’s weather, when they obviously hadn’t bothered to be in other areas. Like his sexual preferences, or his sense of decorum, or his general likes and dislikes of people, for instance, seeing as to how they had provided him last night with jerk Doumeki instead of cute Himawari-chan for a dream partner. Watanuki made a mental note to find someone to complain to regarding this matter as soon as he left his current nightmare.
Of all the people to be stuck in a nightmare with, it had to be Doumeki.
A small, weak, and timid part of Watanuki’s mind tried to argue that that wasn’t necessarily bad, in fact, it was a pretty good thing considering the guy had spirit repellent properties, but the biggest, nastiest, loudest, most anti-Doumeki part of his brain shut it up with a brutal kick and a ferocious half-nelson.
Doumeki was looking at him again, apparently having resigned himself that he wasn’t about to meet his grandfather there.
“How much control do you have over your dreams?”
Another, more cautious part of Watanuki’s mind tried to warn him that it didn’t like the course this conversation was taking and that it would be wise to change the topic soon, but couldn’t be made itself heard over the loud victory yells issuing from the main stream of Watanuki’s thoughts, currently overjoyed at having successfully beaten up the insolent half-thought of Doumeki appreciation. Eventually, the cautious part of his mind just gave up, which caused Watanuki to find no reason not to answer with another question.
“What do you mean by control?”
“Can you choose what your dreams are about?”
Watanuki hugged himself to fend off the cold and considered pouring himself another cup of tea before answering.
“No.”
“Can you choose what happens in those dreams?”
Watanuki had a fleeting memory of being chased by hand-shaped ayakashi, and when he answered, it was in a very emphatic manner, shivering slightly from what he could only assume was residual fear.
“No.”
“Can you choose who appears in the dreams?”
Watanuki sighed miserably, remembering last night’s dream.
“No.”
“Can you control what those people do?”
Once again, he was reminded of last night’s dream, and he shook himself mentally before answering. The last thing he needed was to bring back those images to the forefront of his mind again... although they probably would help him shake off the cold.
“Definitely not.”
“Can you control what you do in the dreams?”
Watanuki thought about it for a second but the cautious part of his mind was still sulking at being ignored and refusing to talk to him, so he decided to answer with the truth.
“About as much as I can control what I do in real life.”
“Was it in one of these realistic dreams where you left your glasses?”
Watanuki nodded, and couldn’t help noticing that Doumeki was looking oddly satisfied about something. All kinds of alarms started going off in Watanuki’s mind. Clearly nothing good could come out of Doumeki feeling pleased about anything. Something was fishy about this.
Unfortunately, Watanuki was getting too distracted by the cold now to care much what Doumeki was asking about, or the answers he was giving in return, no matter how many alarms were blaring off in his mind. He poured himself a second cup of tea and felt disappointed at how fast it grew cold when he tried to warm his hands with the cup.
That was the only reason he answered like he did when Doumeki fired away the most important of his questions.
“Have you met anybody else besides my grandfather in your dreams?”
“Yeah. Generally it’s Yuuko-san, but I’ve met a childhood friend a couple of times.” A dead childhood friend, but Doumeki didn’t need to know that. Watanuki continued, counting with his fingers as he enumerated. “Sakura and Syaoran, the girl with the bells and you.”
“Me?”
Watanuki realized how stupid he had been in mentioning that when Doumeki looked like he had found the answer he had been looking for all along. The cautious part of his mind ‘hmph’-ed in an ‘I-told-you-so’ way and crossed its arms, enjoying Watanuki’s discomfort immensely and refusing to cooperate now that its help was desperately needed.
Watanuki started babbling at high speed, desperately describing a dream he had had a while back, definitely not the one he had had the previous night, in the hopes that Doumeki would think that was the only one of his dreams in which he had made a guest appearance.
“We were fishing but we couldn’t catch anything so we went to find a place to rest for the night but once we did we were attacked and chased by women who weren’t really women but...”
“Birds,” the other boy supplied. “And I distracted them by throwing the fish bait so we could escape.”
Watanuki gaped, his mind now full of a nasty kind of buzz that didn’t let him think properly. He hadn’t told anybody about this dream before, not even Himawari-chan.
“How the hell did you know that?”
Is he a mind reader, after all?
“Because I had the same dream too, not so long ago. So I was just sharing one of your realistic dreams... no wonder I woke up with a funny smell in my hands that morning. That was just the fish bait.”
Watanuki could feel destiny laughing at him when the other boy looked straight at him and asked, in what seemed to be his normal tone of voice but that to him sounded cavernous, mocking and cruel, “What did you dream about last night?”
Panic, sheer, blinding panic, flooded his mind and left his mouth in a shriek.
“Why would you care what I dreamt about last night?”
Doumeki seemed on the verge of answering for a moment, but then raised a hand to tug at the collar of his shirt instead, exposing the skin of his neck and part of his chest.
Watanuki stared dumbly for a second before he noticed what it was Doumeki was trying to show him: a coin-shaped, rosy-coloured bruise, right where the neck and the shoulder met. Even Watanuki could tell at a glance what that bruise really was, even if his mind was refusing point-blank to call it by its proper name.
...although it did supply him, and quite readily at that, with a flash of his dream that would explain how that particular brand of bruise got to be in Doumeki’s neck in the first place, and who had left it there.
So much for trying to keep those images out of the forefront of his mind...
A fresh wave of panic coursed through him at the possibility -looking more feasible every second- that last night’s dreams had been more than a simple dream, after all.
He hastily tried to stand up, ready to defend his honour and his dignity from this horribly cruel joke destiny and Doumeki were playing on him, but found that his legs were by now so stiff by the cold that he only succeeded in tripping and falling in an undignified heap to the floor.
Confused, he tried again with similar results. It was then that he recognized the cold for what it was, when he looked at Doumeki and noticed that the guy wasn’t even shivering.
He had felt that kind of cold only once before, in the Lady of the Spiders’ lair.
He had labelled this dream as a nightmare, and so he was about to face the consequences of such an action by having an unseen, extremely powerful ayakashi attack him and try to eat him.
The monsters that plagued his nightmares were usually much, much worse than the ones he could find when awake, since they were sort of a collection of the worst features of each of the ayakashi he had encountered.
Among those, what had scared him the most was the Lady of the Spiders’ cold, as it was something he couldn’t fight. Bad smells were annoying but harmless, nausea he could tolerate and he never sustained heavy damage from fainting, but that unnatural cold that had threatened to plunge him into a dreamless sleep from which he would never wake up had managed to worm its way to the top three of his ‘worst things that an ayakashi can do to me’ list, right next to eating and possessing.
Normally, this wouldn’t be so worrisome, as, in typical nightmare fashion, he would wake up before things got really nasty. Usually his nightmares involved being chased for a while, tripping, and waking up before the ayakashi had made up its mind where it was going to start eating him by.
He had already done the tripping, so he curled up in a shivering ball on the floor, glaring at Doumeki and daring him to laugh at his predicament, hoping that the ayakashi would show up soon so that he could wake up and avoid having to admit anything to the annoying guy.
However, an unsuspected problem had popped into existence as his dreams got gradually more real. Watanuki hadn’t had a nightmare in a long time, so he hadn’t yet realized that in the same way as the actions in his dreams affected his waking self, anything that happened in a nightmare would equally have consequences once he woke up.
Blissfully ignorant of the seriousness of the situation, Watanuki only proceeded to glare at Doumeki as the jerk finally seemed to notice that something very wrong was happening to him.
He watched as the guy stood up and ran towards him, looking sharply around, trying to spot the source of his discomfort.
It didn’t take him long to find it, as in that very same instant, an ayakashi in the shape of a fine mist materialized all around Watanuki’s lying figure, growing denser and intensifying the effect it had on the boy by the second.
Watanuki couldn’t help but think with some irony that at least this situation had managed to dissuade Doumeki from asking anymore questions or flashing him anymore bruises of dubious virtue.
Watanuki was shivering violently from the cold by now, his hands and feet numb, his teeth chattering despite his very best efforts to make them behave. It was humiliating to be there on the floor, curled up on himself, suffering from the intense cold while the jerk felt nothing at all and just kept looking at him like that.
Watanuki looked up from his position at Doumeki, who was standing next to him, staring fixedly at him. Watanuki was so confused, so humiliated and so ashamed from the night’s revelations, that it looked to him as though Doumeki was gloating at his misery.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As a matter of fact, at that moment Doumeki’s mind was working like mad, trying to push out the guilt of being so caught up in their conversation that he hadn’t realized something was wrong with Watanuki until it was painfully obvious. He had noticed Watanuki had seemed distracted while they talked and he had been surprised at the usually spazzing teenager’s lack of reluctance to answer his questions, but to think that this had been the reason... He forcefully drove those thoughts out of his mind. He knew that guilt was useless, and he couldn’t allow himself to dwell in it if he was to find a way to free the shivering boy from the clutches of the ayakashi he could barely see as a thin mist. He didn’t have his bow, and his bag... he wouldn’t be able to use the contents by himself. It wasn’t finished, after all... Would it work if he attacked the ayakashi with his bare hands? Would his ‘cleansing aura’ as Yuuko called it, be effective even without a medium to transfer it? Maybe he would chance the bag, anyway. He wanted, needed to help, but what if he actually made the problem worse?
Watanuki knew nothing of these thoughts, though, so he just looked up in anger at Doumeki and spoke, his words coming so bitter, and so intense, that they sounded very much like a curse.
“It would be nice,” said Watanuki, forcing the words through his chattering teeth, “if the ayakashi latched to you instead of me, for a change.”
For many years to come, Watanuki would regret having said those words. He had meant them as nothing more than a way to erase that annoyingly blank look out of Doumeki’s face. He certainly hadn’t meant them to cause what happened immediately after uttering them.
Because what happened after those words left his mouth, born out of his frustration, his confusion, his shame, was that the cloud that had started to gather slowly around himself left him completely... only to surround Doumeki instead.
He felt only a second of gleeful triumph, during which he actually quite enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t feeling so cold any longer, and that Doumeki would, for once, learn what it meant to be stalked and annoyed by ayakashi no matter what he did to avoid it.
After the second was over, however, he quickly discovered what a disgusting, evil thought that had been, when he noticed that the ayakashi was having a radically different effect on Doumeki than it had had on him.
Instead of shivering with cold and curling up in a little ball like he had, like he imagined the infuriating guy would, Doumeki actually stumbled, face locked in a grimace of pain and surprise, hands clawing at his own chest. It didn’t take Watanuki long to realize what was happening. The ayakashi had gone for Doumeki’s lungs, and was slowly choking him to death.
The reason for this was simple, yet no less serious for that. While Watanuki’s nightmares involved being unable to escape one of the many ayakashi that tried to eat him on a daily basis, Doumeki’s worst nightmare occurrence was going back to a time when he had been so weak physically that the most innocent allergy-induced asthma attack could degenerate into a mortal threat. His parents hadn’t chosen to dress their only son in kimono meant for a girl because of how cute he looked in them. They had done so in a desperate bid to save his life.
Suddenly Watanuki felt a different kind of cold washing over him.
This couldn’t be happening. It simply couldn’t.
He watched, horror-struck, as Doumeki fell to his knees, mouth opening and closing in an effort to bring air into his lungs, horrible choking noises issuing from his throat. Then slowly, so very slowly, Doumeki fell forward, supporting his weight with one arm against the floor, the other reaching for something that was too far from him to get.
For the space of several seconds or several days, Watanuki simple watched as Doumeki’s face turned slightly red, then purple, and then slowly began to pale. His mind felt sluggish, locked in horror at the scenes playing in front of his eyes, stupidly telling himself that this was definitely one of the worst nightmares he had had, and hoping he would wake up soon.
After those seconds or days were over, however, his mind started working so fast and so furiously that all movement seemed to slow down to almost nothing.
If this was a nightmare -no doubts about that- and it was following the logic of his other dreams, then whatever happened inside it would happen in the real world too. Which was to say if he didn’t do anything to help Doumeki... if he didn’t...
A feeling of complete hopelessness came over Watanuki when the whole truth struck him, the whole, horrible truth that, adept as he was at attracting spirits, he was totally powerless when it came to driving them away. That was Doumeki’s and Yuuko’s expertise, not his. He had no means to answer Doumeki’s silent plea for help when the suffering young man raised his gaze from the floor, looking at him straight in the eye, those horrible, horrible choking noises still issuing from his mouth.
Watanuki had never felt so helpless in his entire life.
He was used to being attacked by whatever supernatural beings there were in a hundred meter radius, he was used to being the one that suffered from strange afflictions that had nothing to do with normal sicknesses, and lately, he had even started to get used to being the one being rescued all the time, but never before had he been in a situation when he was actually expected to help rescue someone else, someone important to him, without any sort of advice or reassurance that he could do a good job of it. Yuuko-san wasn’t there, Haruka-san wasn’t there. He didn’t have the kudakitsune with him, heck; he didn’t even have Mokona to help him. He was alone with the knowledge that one of the most important people in his life -whether he wanted to admit it or not- was going to die right in front of him, because of him, and he would be unable to do anything to stop it.
It was terrifying, overwhelming, unbearable. He had to help, he had to do something, anything. He couldn’t... he simply couldn’t stay there as Doumeki was slowly being choked to death. He had to at least try... even if it probably wouldn’t help at all. It was then, as he forced himself to drag his eyes away from Doumeki’s face, that he paid attention for the first time to the motions Doumeki was doing with his free arm. Stupidly, he looked to where the flailing arm was trying to reach, and his eyes finally discovered a shape several feet away from them. It was the ugly cloth bag he had noticed Doumeki was carrying when they had been abducted into this, his worst nightmare.
Desperately, Watanuki began to run towards Doumeki’s bag and wondered what he was supposed to do. Toss it at Doumeki? Hit the ayakashi with it? What was so special about that bag, anyway?
And how the hell was he supposed to stay calm enough to devise a plan of action when the other guy was making those horrible, horrible choking noises? When he couldn’t get the image of his suffering face out of his mind? When he could barely breathe himself through the huge lump in his throat?
In what seemed like an eternity, Watanuki reached the bag, and as soon as he touched it he noticed something was strange. The bag felt weird. It felt warm. It felt clean.
He yanked it open and his eyes immediately found what the source of that warmth and cleanness was. It was a bag of salt.
He immediately grabbed it and ran back to Doumeki, determined but scared, so very scared. What if it didn’t work? Salt only worked with minor ayakashi, never with the big, evil type that was currently slowly choking Doumeki to death. He knew, he had tried enough times.
Watanuki was running so fast his legs were protesting at the effort. It was only a very short distance to cover, so why did it seem like he was never getting close enough? Why couldn’t he stop staring at Doumeki’s writhing shape, his face blue, his hands clawing at the floor in spasmodic motions, his pleading eyes fixed on him? Why did the sight hurt so much?
In a single fluid motion, Watanuki grabbed both of the bag’s handles, turned, and threw it at the ayakashi, praying desperately that he wouldn’t miss, that it would work, that the thing would leave Doumeki alone.
The bag, pouring salt from the mouth, plunged straight to the middle of the now very dense-looking mist.
A deafening shriek.
A flash of light.
The ayakashi was gone.
Doumeki, free, started coughing violently, taking huge shuddering gulps of air in between coughs. He was free, he was fine, he was breathing, he was alive.
Watanuki, without even realizing what he was doing, slumped to the floor and started to tremble violently. He was alive. Doumeki was alive.
It was too much for him. The sudden release of tension, the huge waves of relief coursing through his body coupled with the overwhelming guilt and the last effects of the ayakashi’s presence took their toll on his weakened body.
He barely managed to turn away from Doumeki before the first wave of overpowering nausea hit him. He threw up, hacking and coughing almost as violently as the other boy, and it seemed to take forever to empty his stomach, but when he was done, he felt better.
He was still trembling from head to toes, dangerously close to tears, and wallowing in a pool of self-loathing, but he felt better. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and jumped when he felt a hand touch him gently on the back.
“Are you alright?”
Doumeki was wearing such a strange look on his face that it took Watanuki a second to identify it. Concern. The idiot had been this close to death and he was still finding time to be concerned about him, who had caused Doumeki to be in that predicament in the first place. Watanuki wasn’t sure if he wanted to strangle the other boy, scream himself silly at the sheer idiocy of the guy, or start crying for all it was worth. He compromised by taking the cup of tea Doumeki was holding in his outstretched hand and rinsing his mouth, glad to be able to get rid of the nasty aftertaste of vomit.
When he had calmed down enough to trust himself not to scream, he answered.
“Are you?”
Doumeki shrugged.
“Now I am, thanks to you.”
And now he was thanking him. Watanuki felt anger rising in him uncontrollably and he couldn’t take it anymore. He exploded.
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you being so nice? It was me who threw that ayakashi at you! You could have been killed! You almost were! Why aren’t you angry at me? Why aren’t you yelling? It was my fault!”
He was so angry he couldn’t even scream properly. He hated how weak and pathetic his voice sounded, more like a whine than a proper scream.
He had crushed the paper cup in his hand, and now he was trembling worse than ever.
Doumeki just kept looking at him with that alien concerned expression. When he answered, it was in his normal, even voice, with his simple, straight-forward and blunt brand of logic.
“I can’t be angry at you because I’m too glad you are alive.”
He couldn’t meet Doumeki’s eyes. He couldn’t look directly at those golden eyes, they were so damn gentle. It wasn’t normal, Doumeki wasn’t supposed to look like that; he wasn’t supposed to be able to feel anything that would cause his face to look like that, to make him look at him like that.
The fact that he was, only made him feel worse at the possibility, so very real only a few moments before, that Doumeki could have stopped being altogether, all because of him.
“You saved me.”
Watanuki was startled from his thoughts by this declaration, startled and shaken. Why couldn’t the guy have the decency to be properly angry at him? It would have been so much easier that way...
“From a situation I got you into in the first place.”
He would have wanted to sound angry when saying that. He would have wanted to yell or scream, but for some reason only managed a pathetic, strangled sort of guilty whine.
“But you saved me.”
He found no retort to give this time.
“Why?” The voice, deep and soft, was calm, like he was inquiring about nothing more trivial than the weather.
Why? He could have answered automatically that it was because that was the normal thing for anybody to do. That he would have done the same thing for anybody else. He could even have said that it was guilt that drove him, in an effort not to have the guy’s death on his conscience.
But he knew that none of those had been the reason.
If he was going to be honest with himself, perhaps for the first time, Watanuki would have to admit that he had saved Doumeki because he had been afraid, simply afraid.
The sole idea that Doumeki could disappear from his life had hurt too much, too deeply, and it had made him afraid, way too afraid.
He had once lost the two most important people in his life when his parents had been snatched from him when he was still a child. He didn’t want to go through the same thing again. Never again. And if that meant stomping on his pride and admitting that Doumeki was way too dear to him to be able to stand losing him, then that’s what he would do.
Watanuki covered his face with his hands, tears streaming out of his eyes now, brow scrunched up as if in pain, ashamed of the anguished sobs that were escaping his mouth, that made his words sound too weak, too distorted, too pathetic.
“I saved you because I didn’t want you to disappear.”
Was this how Doumeki had felt? Was this how it had felt to watch him be attacked and get hurt, once and again, closer to death every time? Was this why Doumeki had been willing to sacrifice so much, even risking being hated, being loathed, just to keep him alive?
And how had he repaid him? By being angry, rude, ungrateful, always suspecting him of the worst. By insulting him every available opportunity, avoiding him at all costs, complaining loudly every time they had been alone together, every time the guy had come along when he had wanted to be with Himawari-chan, even though he knew that Doumeki’s presence was the only thing stopping him from being affected too badly by her condition. The guy had even had the tact never to mention it, though it would have been perfectly in his right to do so.
He had repaid him by causing an ayakashi to attack and nearly kill him.
Pride be damned, it wasn’t Doumeki who had always been in the wrong.
The guy was annoying, bad-mannered, blunt, shameless and infuriatingly inexpressive, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t be a good friend. In fact, he had never been anything but.
Ever since they met, Watanuki hadn’t even had a chance to get lonely, because the guy had always been there.
Annoying him, being rude to him, pissing him off, practically stalking him, but he had been there every time he had needed company, there to protect him even though he did nothing to deserve it, there to help him understand with his bluntness that he wasn’t alone, that there were people who would go to any lengths to ensure that he was alive, and well, and happy.
And that he was one of them. Not because Watanuki deserved it, but because Doumeki had chosen to be.
Watanuki didn’t know how long he remained where he was, sitting on the floor, crying harder than he had in years, his entire body shaking with the intensity of his shame, his pain and his guilt. He only knew that Doumeki never left his side, and never tried to say anything, neither in answer to his declaration nor to dissuade him from crying.
He was grateful to him for that. He didn’t think he could have taken it if Doumeki had tried to comfort him or if he had asked him to explain himself further.
It felt like an eternity later when his tears finally slowed, his sobs subsided and he started feeling very foolish indeed, sitting on the floor while Doumeki watched him sniffle.
Watanuki dried his face forcefully with his hands and tried his best to make his voice sound normal when he spoke.
“We should be looking for a way to get back.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Watanuki snapped his head up in surprise at these words, and stared at Doumeki, who was standing at his side, offering a hand to help him stand up.
“We’re back already.”
That’s it for chapter three, people.
click here to go to chapter four
Please remember that feedback of any kind is highly appreciated. :)
In case you missed them, here is chapter one and chapter two.
Glossary and cultural notes:
Gouchisousama: ‘It was a feast’. Japanese people say this when they finish eating. Companion to this phrase is ‘Itadakimasu’ (I receive this), which is said before starting to eat, though Doumeki rarely ever says it. Both are a way of saying your thanks for the food and a compliment to the one who made it.
Regarding salt: In Japan, salt is supposed to chase away evil, and is typically used in purification rituals. That’s why you will sometimes see anime characters throwing salt when they meet a disagreeable person; they are actually implying that person is a demon or an evil spirit, which is pretty insulting no matter how you look at it.