Title: measure for measure
Author: Neo
Genre: Romance
Rating: K+
Summary: He’s only, like, the most popular guy in school. (AKA: Doumeki would not make a good celebrity. Because of his poor management skills, Watanuki suffers in a very roundabout way.) [doumekiwatanuki]

---

Author’s Notes: lyzzle’s request. The theme was “worthiness” and she wanted as little angst as possible. :) Well, no outright angst, but there is a bit of drama and an even smaller bit of action amidst the usual crack and love.

I’m going to be talking about this piece in another post because it turned out really quite interesting to write. Plus, it is massive.

Note that the parts are numbered. I actually did all of these out of order. The first part actually written was the third.

Do recall, kids, that I would be happy to redo requests if the completed piece is not to your satisfaction. ^_^

---

1.

Doumeki was well aware of the fact that he was many things: an archer; Yuuko’s secondary errand boy (the one who received no penance whatsoever for jobs well done); the star of the archery team; in the ninety-sixth percentile; whatever the hell he was or tried to be for Watanuki Kimihiro at any given moment; and the most popular middleclassman at Cross.

About that last bit—

It wasn’t that he was ignorant of it—quite the opposite. He was just unmindful. He ate the chocolates he got on Valentine’s Day; the numbers he received each year had undergone a steady increase since about second grade, so he became officially unmindful of White Day when he was in about fourth grade and never gave anything back (which never deterred anyone). If the handwritten bits in a card were more than three sentences, he threw it away, envelope and all. He tuned out the high-pitched voices and the giggles, shrugged away foreign touches. Though they only approached him head-on sometimes, if they could catch him alone, and if they asked to talk to him in private he usually acquiesced, though such talks were fruitless for either party. He didn’t really have a weakness for crying girls and never stopped to wonder the whys and hows of the ways he walked away, of how people were always staring at his back.

His mother had chastised him when he was in fifth grade, waggled her finger, being very good and righteous of it. She still said it, today—just with her eyes, mockingly disdainful when they rested upon small tote bags of gifts hefted under his arm every year: If a crying girl doesn’t break your heart, she said, nothing will.

He didn’t believe her much, but he didn’t not believe her, so he waited for one of them to be proven wrong.

• • •

2.

He’d actually been in the ninety-seventh percentile up until a short while ago, around the time that he started looking forward to lunch periods, which was marginally unusual because he never looked forward to much.

After school, he shadowed Watanuki’s footsteps, listening to much ado about nothing, and thought that class hours were too long—so were the ones he spent at home—and these moments too short, lengthened only painfully so when Watanuki’s eyes grew bluer with fear.

• • •

3.

Watanuki Kimihiro was accosted during art class, tugged from Himawari’s side by slender, insistent arms, the owners of which would only spare him daggers for glances—until, at last, a shadow fell over him and he realized they were at the sunless side of the school, the part that was all cold intersecting planes of gray wall and gray ground and garbage cans and a scent representative of things fouler than garbage.

Today, however, it smelled unusually of strong and mildly pricey perfumes.

He glanced up at a righteous gaggle of females, a small handful of which were upperclassmen, and an even smaller (but more notable still) handful of which were cracking their knuckles.

“Er,” he began.

“Watanuki Kimihiro?”

It was the most foremost one, tall with short, dark pigtails that mildly resembled small black fires sprouting from the sides of her head.

Watanuki blinked.

“Watanuki Kimihiro,” the foremost one said again, and something shifted beneath her hairline.

“Yes?” he asked amidst a short, rapid-fire succession of blinks.

“I think,” she said, and she spoke very slowly, “we need to talk.”

He thought, She seems angry. And then he thought that particular brand of sharp-fanged, dagger-eyed, hotblooded anger was oddly familiar—

—which was actually right around the time that warning bells began their ritualistic sound-off in his head.

• • •

4.

It was a very short talk.

The short pigtailed one and her friends were very happy when it was through, and more polite. Watanuki was just confused, but then he didn’t have time to be confused when a pair of eyes glowed sinisterly at him from beneath the lid of a garbage can; he ran instead.

• • •

5.

“Okay,” Watanuki said at the gate, clapping his hands once. “Those girls told me not to walk with you, and I needed an excuse not to walk with you anyway, so. HAVE A HORRIBLE DAY.”

“What. The hell,” Doumeki said, eloquently. That was after Watanuki was already gone.

• • •

6.

Watanuki was nursing a bruise on his forearm, so Doumeki made it a point to grab him by the elbow the next day.

“Who, now?”

“Who what?”

“Who told you not to—”

He cut himself off, there. And then he took a breath, and said, “Who were those girls?”

Watanuki wrenched his arm free, wincing in such a way that Doumeki could not prevent himself from wincing immediately afterward. “I don’t know. They’re not in my class.”

Doumeki exhaled sharply, and ran a hand through his hair, frustrated suddenly; it was a prickly sort of feeling that made him want to punch everything and anything except its source. He took another breath, then schooled his features, and made to ask what those girls looked like, but instead asked, “That bruise.” He glanced at it, and Watanuki’s eyes followed suit. “Where did you get it?”

“Mugger,” Watanuki said, simply.

“What.” Oh, hell no.

Watanuki glanced to his left, then to his right; then, he leaned forward and might have looked conspiratorial if he didn’t look so annoyed. He hissed through his teeth, “Big dumb stripey thing with big dumb stripey fangs, okay. Geez, you’re so bothersome.”

Doumeki stared down at him, an eyebrow elevated nearly to his hairline, his eyes with none of their trademark heavy lids; he felt the edge of his lip twitch and curl downward into a frown, and harden that way. There was that frustration again, folding in on itself, compacting; behind his closed mouth he felt his jaw clench. His expression set itself slowly, and it was a stark change from his usual dispassionate expression—one with which Watanuki was fairly certain he had been familiar with already—it had lost him an eyepatch and it also got him up against a wall being spoken to with a contained yell.

“Don’t yell,” Watanuki muttered, cautiously, glancing off to the side.

Doumeki lifted his hand, and his fingers. They ghosted over the side of Watanuki’s face, light and fleetingly warm, so much so that Watanuki couldn’t tell if he’d actually touched him or not.

Doumeki’s fingers folded; his fist closed.

“Okay,” Doumeki said.

When he walked away, his back was straight and tall, and reminded Watanuki of the empty bowstrings he pulled; when he turned a corridor, Watanuki turned away.

• • •

7.

Watanuki was pulled away during art class again.

He wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt and said, “Is this about Doumeki again?”

“Yes,” the pigtailed one said, folding her arms. “We saw you talking to him yesterday.”

“Uh,” Watanuki said, and felt just the slightest bit annoyed, “he was talking to me. That guy does whatever he wants; it’s not my problem.”

She looked positively cowed. “The way he touched your face—”

“He didn’t touch me,” Watanuki said, and blinked. Well. That was the conclusion he’d forced himself to reach, at any rate.

One of the girls behind the seething pigtailed one peered out. “Did he cut you?” she asked, half in wonderment.

“OF COURSE HE WOULDN’T,” the pigtailed one screeched, spinning around, looking mortified by the concept. “DOUMEKI-KUN WOULDN’T DO SUCH A THING, NOT EVEN TO THIS GUY.”

“Of course he wouldn’t,” Watanuki said, and blinked, sifting the bandages on his face.

Pigtailed girl’s head turned around with such agonizing slowness that he thought it creaked on her neck; her eyes were completely shadowed in her bangs.

“Mugger,” he said, shrugging.

• • •

8.

“Doumeki-kun, come sit with us,” Himawari had said, waving brightly, and Doumeki had nodded once and sat down.

Watanuki glanced over at him; Doumeki looked back. Watanuki scowled, then turned, and tried to ignore the sets of eyes on him—Doumeki’s, and at least five or six girls in his grade, leering from around a corner at the space between Doumeki’s seat and Watanuki’s.

This was getting ridiculous.

• • •

9.

“Watanuki-san,” the girl was saying, “I’ve been extremely patient with you so far, but seriously, it’s like you’re not even listening, I—”

“I’m listening, I’m listening,” Watanuki was saying, waving his hands a bit and glancing harriedly over her shoulder. “I will live a virtuous and Doumeki-less life, just—”

That pair of glowing eyes underneath the third trash can from the left, nearest to the tree that had a set of initials carved into it—being dragged directly near it on a bi-daily basis had to be a bad idea, and it was, in so many ways. Of course it’d get pissed if a gaggle of slightly insane (as Watanuki suspected, because, clearly, anyone with any degree of—of fascination with Doumeki Shizuka had to be insane on some intrinsic level) girls kept stomping all about on its territory, its home. Watanuki had exceptionally bad experience with things that liked their homes undamaged and not encroached upon.

Inwardly, he cursed his inability to pay attention to the supposedly small things as he watched something with very sharp claws and very luminous, angry eyes float upwards.

The trash can lid carelessly tossed itself aside.

The pigtailed one spun around, said, “Mitsuko, what is that racket, I’m trying to speak to this idiot—”

Mitsuko blinked, and trembled a bit. “I didn’t do it, Ri-chan, it moved on its own.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “It just flew on its own all the way over there. Just—stand there and shut it, Mitsuko, I’ll be done in a second.”

“Mitsuko-san,” Watanuki said, very slowly and very clearly. “Move.”

“What!?” she half-yelled. The monster at the wall winced and grew visibly angrier, a low, reverberating growl emerging from deep in its throat like a steady succession of drums.

“I, er. I mean I would very much like it if you came over here, please.”

The pigtailed girl—Ri-something, from the way Mitsuko had addressed her—shot him a look lacerated with nice, pure, green venom. “Why does she need to do that? Where do you get off telling her what to do, anyway?”

“I don’t,” Watanuki said.

He could have said something, then. He could have. He’d been so full of light and prancing and sparkles over the past few days, with only Himawari with him, that his face sort of ached from smiling, his jaunty gait a bit tired of all the prancing, his sparkles all gone and out. Plus, every few square inches of him were saturated in pale bruises and white-white scars, the likes of which he hadn’t had since before Yuuko, before Doumeki.

But he was too preoccupied with rushing forward, shoving that Mitsuko out of the way and staggering as the claws, sharp glinting scythes of oily black, they were reaching and a bit too close to his weighted heart—the fabric of his uniform gave way like butter beneath those things, stronger and sharper than steel, and he thought and knew nothing except the security of the knowledge that he was going to die behind a school with witnesses that would not really witness anything at all except just him, falling and bleeding and dying. He was going to die; he knew it in a way that surpassed certainty.

As secure as he was in that knowledge, though, it failed him.

A pair of strong arms wrapped around him from behind as the creature let loose an earsplitting screech before dissipating into the cool air.

• • •

10.

There were two conversations going on in the recently-exorcised sect of the school grounds, near the third trash can from the left, nearest to the tree that had a set of initials carved into it.

One was really quite uninteresting.

“OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE,” Ri-something was half-screaming, half-crying.

“I think it’s cute,” Mitsuko was saying, a simple statement of what she believed to be fact rather than any attempt to sate the pigtailed girl’s fury.

The other was equally uninteresting.

“You,” Doumeki was saying, “are the biggest fool I have ever met,” and he fingered the broad slit torn into Watanuki’s shirt before taking off his jacket and easing an acquiescent Watanuki into it.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t remind me,” Watanuki was muttering, tightening the jacket around himself. “Shut up, I hate you.”

“You’re welcome,” the other boy said, in a tone that might be construed as gentle.

“Yeah, yeah. Welcome. I know.” Watanuki sniffed, and folded his arms. “So are you.” Pale patches of color flickered beneath his eyes, and then he said, “Now can we leave? Your stupid fan club is bugging me. Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Nowhere,” Doumeki said agreeably, and followed Watanuki away.