Current mood:	sick
Entry tags:	fan fiction (2005), xxxholic

Title: Anemone
Author: Neo
Genre: Angst/General
Rating: T
Summary: Years later, they grow the hell up. [doumekiwatanuki]

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Author’s Notes: Standard WATANUKI INHERITS THE SHOP thing. Except with gay-flavored angst. I blame all of you.

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The end was five years ago, one after the beginning.

There was an end; there was a means, there was justification. The ending got him, in the end. Being all quiet and cool and sullen and—in a way, the ending had modeled itself after him. It was karma, it was fate. Hitsuzen.

Doumeki’s careful not to write it the way she wrote it, if he ever writes it anymore.

…because he’d look too hard, strain himself, waiting for the letters to glow or leap up at him or eat something. Other letters. Cures not for eyes but for the feeling in him that’s all made up of crushed grass.

…When he does write it the way she wrote it, it’s not too late but not early at all in a million ways other than the fact that it’s eleven in the morning. It’s one day five years later. It’s a day wherein his classes are cancelled. It’s a while after his twenty-second birthday (which he spent rifling through the boxes at his doorstep looking for doughy candies and when he found a box he stared at it and left it under the sofa for four weeks before throwing it out). It’s April first and a year he only remembers when he has to add the date to thick papers on English literature.

Which is when it starts to smell: incense.

He stands because he has no reason not to and lets it lead him to an alleyway between a coffee shop and a pawnshop; it drowns out the musty smell and descends deep into chilly, damp shadow, and he walks into that corridor that might be a cave, which leads to a broad, solid doorframe that glints of polish and smells antique. He pushes aside the sliding door.

“Your shoes,” a voice says. It’s awkward—not quite scripted and wielded by something deadly and beautiful and elegant, but—there were a million moments, there, waiting for them and, in his abrupt and utter bewilderment, the young man in the field green organza had chosen the one that had, perhaps, first sprung to mind.

“Oh,” Doumeki says. Breathes, maybe.

“You know my voice,” the sorcerer says, very distantly. Expectant, but still surprised.

“I do,” Doumeki says. “I have.”

And takes off his shoes, leaving them by the door.


“Have a seat,” the sorcerer says, after a pause. He looks as though he’s been lounging on a chaise all his life, which Doumeki is certain he hasn’t—besides, the very extent to which this man can be unrelaxed—he seems to have attained it, here, with Doumeki standing ramrod-straight yards across the threshold in his college jacket and socks.

Doumeki doesn’t budge an inch.

“You’re angry,” the sorcerer says after another pause, a dazed, almost childish observation.

“I don’t have to do anything you say,” Doumeki says, suddenly. Listens to the words as they come out of his mouth, tries to pinpoint what it is in his tone that hasn’t been there in a veritable age—more than half a decade—and realizes it’s conviction and something festering squelchy in him—as though there’s been a storm crossing all about his veins and nerves and thoughts for as long as he bothers to consciously remember, and he’s just been in the eye of it for so long; he’s already forgotten. “You left.”

His fists clench; his nails dig into his palms. The sorcerer looks concerned, human, and moves as though to reach, but his long arm swimming in ornamental fabric doesn’t make it all the way across the foyer; he says, “Don’t do that,” and Doumeki says, “Afraid I’ll bleed on your carpet?”

It’s a very nice carpet under his feet, rich violet thing.

The arm drops quickly; the head almost bows.

The very nice carpet gets a lot closer, which is about the same time when Doumeki falls to his knees. He inhales, through teeth gritted so hard they might shatter, and folds his arms about himself, convulsing violently. And then—about that very nice violet carpet—

He gets sick all over it.


“I don’t want anything from you,” Doumeki mutters, wiping his mouth long minutes later, batting aside a pair of blank-eyed children toting about saucers of tea and pills with his shaking hands.

“You never did,” the sorcerer says slowly, softly, gently.

“If you’re pitying me right now, I swear I’ll fucking—”

Doumeki stops just then. He shivers, once, and nearly takes out a support beam with his whitened fist.

The man’s face is laced with terrible, terrible pain. “I wasn’t.”

Doumeki turns on him, eyes wide, irises black pinholes, vortexes of rage.

“Doumeki, your—”

The sorcerer stops himself, folds his hand to his heart, and says, “Doumeki-san.” Then, “Your hand.”

“Don’t help me. Don’t touch me.”

“Please—let me—”

They both fell silent—Doumeki, his knuckles bleeding freely in thin rivulets, falling over his forearms.

The sorcerer, who says, brokenly, “I ask nothing of you.”

Doumeki loosens his jacket so as to form a makeshift wrap about the bridge of his knuckles, atop the fractured skin. The vomit on the floor is gone, suddenly, and the peculiarly vacant-eyed children whisk themselves and some cleaning supplies with illegible labels away; he says, “You never had to ask.”


“She was tired, Doumeki-san,” he says, quietly, to Doumeki’s back, to Doumeki’s hand lingering on the doorframe. To the lanterns that flare overhead as somewhere, wherever they are, the sun goes down; it spills on the raw ridges of the back of Doumeki’s hand and the edges of his hair.

“Really,” Doumeki says. Not quite a mutter, not a whisper. Emptily.

“And…I thought…”

“Thought what?”

The man catches himself, shakes his head a bit—a gesture Doumeki can’t see but knows about, just knows. “Five years,” he says. “Time passes more slowly sometimes. More quickly at others. It is difficult, but…” He swallows, hard. “Seeing you—I knew, then. Five years.

“Not a day went by wherein I didn’t—” he swallows again, averts his eyes. “I always wondered what I would say, if we were to meet again and should you not have already forgotten me. Sometimes I thought I knew exactly what to say and do.” He shivers violently for just a second, just a second. “Arrogant, right?”

Doumeki glances, once. Sharp but slow. No less harshly than before, either; it’s chilling and makes one of the lanterns go out above his head where the rafters are.

“I would never have forgotten,” the man says. “Never—not in a million years or a million dimensions. I understood you the least, you know. Billions of people wanted things, at least a sixth of them died for the wanting. I thought you would never come; you never…never wanted for anything.” He licks his lips, holds himself more tightly. “Not of anyone, not of me. You never expected anything from me other than what I would let myself give. You just…were. And you were content.

“And then I was gone, and you never came, so I thought you were still content. Maybe you had forgotten.”

Doumeki’s hand twitches on the wood.

“Maybe you are a fool,” Doumeki says, barely a whisper.

“Arrogant, right?” And then, “…are you a college student now?”

Doumeki inclines his head, once.

“Eating right?”

“No.”

(Doumeki’s glower darkens at the reproving look that gets him.)

“That won’t do at all.”

“What do you care?”

“Doumeki-san.”

“Shut up.”

The man in the thick organza looks alarmed. Might be because anger isn’t a good look for him—harder than usual, molten and unfamiliar. By this time, Doumeki’s arms are folded tightly, his shirt straining; the blood’s all faded, the veins in his temple thickly defined, churning. It might be frustration. Frustration’s better than what compelled him to nearly take out the shop’s entire physical presence with a punch. Thousands of beings more powerful than Ichihara Yuuko in the Everywhere, and his eyes would have cut them to ribbons.

Doumeki stands and breathes for a few seconds, the way he used to at the shrine before he left to continue his education. He remembers stepping out on his porch, staring into the yawning entrance to the foliage beyond the temple and the house and the kura; he remembers lingering, and a boy with an eyepatch getting lost on his courtyard.

…then: nothing to remember.

Still a boy.

That one, too.

Both of them.

“I’m not here to be angry, am I,” Doumeki says suddenly, dully, lifting his hands to his face. Anger gives him headaches. Or maybe it’s just. A headache. “Or lectured.”

…Remembering himself, the sorcerer says, “No,” and straightens, slowly and smoothly; softens, perceptibly—weary, all his warmth dulled, caged.

Doumeki turns to face him.

“This shop is for your needs,” the man says, still quiet and altogether foolish, all gawkish limbs and sensible robes that sweep the carpet fibers up and away, “Doumeki-san.” A beat. “Doumeki.” The hard set of the lip, the blue eyes.

Again and always, everywhere.

Doumeki’s not a creature of change.

…and his memory is good. Because that waxen smile hurts him where he thinks his feelings used to be right up until half a decade ago. It’s an old hurt that makes his blood churn and curdle, his mind topple over itself.

…he thinks, perhaps, that this is a thankless job and Doumeki’s is a thankless life and.

Doumeki sort of remains utterly stone-faced, sort of still and sort of quaking; he says: “What about yours?”

“It was never me, Doumeki,” he says.

Softly, softly— “It’s always been you,” and, suddenly, he’s going. It’s simple. They weren’t meant to be anything else. “You idiot. You idiot. It always pissed me off, you know, that way of yours, you—”

The man blinks.

(Whatever’s missing edges a bit closer to that empty spot in the middle of the great big fuckjob of a jigsaw puzzle that is them and everything for which they stand.)

Doumeki forces his eyebrows to straighten; that’s the last straw and it works unexpectedly splendidly.

“I pissed you off,” the sorcerer says sardonically; his lip goes marble to match the rest of him—flawless, chilly. Set. The candles flare, ominous, a set of fireshoulders rising against the south wall, the shadows twisting and contorting on that narrow face, congealing in those eyes; Doumeki could feel the clouds roil, the stars reel—galaxies and universes, pages of them in a book beyond scale or measure, ruffling and stirring and maybe, maybe baring teeth. Poems being swallowed by abyss. The Dimension Witch’s acclaimed heir has just said the word “piss”.

“You wanted to be happy, once,” Doumeki says, his voice as quiet as the rest of the world. No more tricks or games or bait. Maybe more than a little anger, but Doumeki knows enough to know: not now.

“What I want—”

“Matters.”

…the candles go out.

“…see. Present tense. You said it. You said it yourself.”

Doumeki reaches, grabs the man’s hand. Slides up the vast expanse of heavy silk from a China long gone, exposing a slender forearm and knots of strained, bluish veins, and glorious, glorious magic that’s not magic at all.

“You’re not to be what she was,” Doumeki says, not much more than a shadow of a thought.

It’s palpable enough.

“…I still know you,” he confesses.

And, heralding their humanity—tall and graceful and gracious, unhurried—he tipped up Watanuki Kimihiro’s bowed chin. Caresses a pale spot beneath the half-eye that Doumeki loves to know was kept, slides the haori off of a still-slender shoulder. Tangles hair that might have been perfect five seconds or five eternities ago, kisses hard enough to bruise—takes everything he’ll ever want and need, finally takes it because his patience was never limitless and he had to get tired of wishing, once upon a time.