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Watanuki’s with a client when the archer stumbles - shambles - falls face first through the door and collapses to the floor. The client gapes. The archer bleeds. Watanuki scowls.
“Doumeki,” he calls, “don’t die yet, I have to finish this. Ma’am, would you like a receipt?”
Two minutes later the customer - obviously confused, but cautioned not to ask questions - steps around Doumeki’s body and out the front door, while Watanuki notes down her request in neat print. Only then does he look down over the counter. Doumeki hasn’t stopped bleeding, but he’s managed to drag himself a few inches closer. There’s a stain following him, viscous at the edges - knife wound, probably, and deep, considering how fast he’s losing color and breath. Watanuki drums his fingers against the counter. It’ll take forever to bleach the floor.
“I wish,” Doumeki starts. The rest gets lost in a barking cough which leaves his teeth red.
Watanuki flips backwards in his ledger while Doumeki hacks up on the floor. Finds the page by touch, well-worn, dog-earred, incomprehensible to anybody else. Doumeki’s wishes could double as a resume: Poison - fast-acting, untraceable; grappling hook - line can’t be cut; playing cards - Joker always 4th from top. Watanuki’s never asked him what he needs them for, and Doumeki’s never volunteered. Either way, the price is always the same.
Doumeki eventually gets his bearings, though his voice is weak, and wet. He’s propped himself up on one arm like an action hero at the end of the movie, taking that last desperate shot. That one-in-a-million chance. “I wish…” Doumeki rasps, “for my body to be healed… and whole.”
It’s an easy wish. All of his wishes are easy, and the payment is never fair. Doumeki must know. How could he not?
“And your payment?”
“Watanuki…” Doumeki manages to sound like a bitch even when he's dying all over Watanuki's mahogany floors. He’s dressed up nice, tailored pants and a jacket that looks bespoke. Doumeki usually comes in wearing track pants and oversized sweatshirts; somebody put him in that, somebody with enough money to make Doumeki shut up and wear their clothes. All their effort has gone to waste; where the suit isn’t soaked through with blood it hangs off Doumeki in tatters. The target must have been tipped off, been armed and waiting - Doumeki usually doesn’t lose.
Do they shoot at everybody out there, or just you? Watanuki could ask. Is it nice outside the shop? Is the city still the same? Instead he taps his pen against the ledger, a thick, hollow sound. “Yes?”
Doumeki manages to make himself intelligible through a mouth full of blood. “I offer my service.”
Watanuki holds his pen suspended over the ledger. “Your service...?”
“My service to you.”
“Wonderful. Thank you, Doumeki.” A wet punched out noise below. Watanuki decides it means you’re welcome.
When he finally shuts the ledger, rounds the counter, kneels down, he doesn’t forget to shake out his robes so that the sleeves don’t trail in the blood. Yuuko taught him that, before she left. The blood’s already drying thick - no chance it won’t stain. He should charge extra. Yuuko taught him that too.
Most of Doumeki is cold, except for the parts still sticky from bleeding. Watanuki leans over the corpse. Puts his hands on where the heart was beating, brings his face close to the mouth, where there was breath before. Says to Doumeki’s body in a voice that’s soft and sweet, “Your payment is accepted. Your wish is granted.”
When Doumeki’s eyes open, they’re wet. Watanuki’s smiling.
“Welcome back, Shizuka. I’m calling in your payment.”
Yuuko was the one who named him.
That’s what she told Watanuki, anyway. Yuuko can’t be trusted, ever, but Watanuki isn’t interested enough to probe in this particular case. She says she named the archer, she named the archer. If it’s true, it’s the biggest compliment Doumeki ever has gotten and will ever get. If it’s not - it’s Doumeki. Who cares.
The first time they met, Watanuki had been working for Yuuko half a year, more or less. It’s difficult to say how long exactly; lately time has gotten slippery. He used to keep track by way of what fashions the customers wore, but they keep cycling back around, which just makes his head feel fuzzy. They tend to look at him oddly when he asks them what year it is - as if he wasn’t weird enough, beckoning strangers into his lantern-lit hall, promising wishes for the smallest of boons. Eventually he stopped asking. He knows it’s been some time, which is longer than a while.
Working for Yuuko - all things considered, it wasn’t that bad. Back when he was her… apprentice, he moved boxes, wiped down shelves, signed for packages when the delivery men wouldn’t come to the door. It took a few months (years? decades?) but eventually he started learning wish-granting, too. Started skipping school; started noticing that his mom had new wrinkles every time he visited. She’d begun asking where he’d been and where he kept vanishing to. She was so worried - and it had actually felt good, her well-meaning confusion, like he was someone mysterious. Someone secret, and strange. Him and Yuuko.
He could still leave the premises at that point, but Yuuko wasn’t paying him, and so in lieu of searching for a landlord who’d take enigmatic riddles as rent money he slept in the storage room. It was close to the kitchen so he was warm in the winter, and there was enough space to fit a futon and a few tiny flowers. He still sleeps there now, although most of the flowers have died.
But the first time they met they were alive and Doumeki was still young, still hardy, still free of any knife wounds Watanuki could see. The first time they met Yuuko was still shopkeeper.
“Watanuki,” she’d said, in the same way you say a dog’s name before you introduce it to a stranger or threat, “come meet the archer.” She was standing by the back door, which is where Doumeki had come in. Nobody came in the back except for Watanuki; that was the first reason he hated Doumeki. The second was Yuuko’s arm, the way it draped over Doumeki’s shoulder as if it had a proprietary right to be there. The way he let Yuuko touch him, like that. Yuuko only owned precious things: gold, wishes, Watanuki. And apparently, Doumeki.
It was a strange moment to realize his jealous streak.
In the small sitting room, which was really more of a closet, Yuuko - by way of Watanuki - made tea. He served it in tiny chipped cups Yuuko said she got in Gaul, making sure to give the one with the leaky bottom to Doumeki. The intruder drank without comment, except for a passing compliment for its quality. Like he would know this from gutter leaves. Watanuki had already noted Doumeki’s dirty sneakers. His vacant eyes.
Yuuko waited until they were all settled - Watanuki having been instructed to sit with them - before getting to the matter at hand. “It’s time you two became acquainted. Doumeki Shizuka, Watanuki Kimihiro. He helps run the shop. Watanuki Kimihiro, Doumeki Shizuka. He’s my errand boy.” She punctuated this with a long, lingering sip, watching him watch Doumeki over the rim of her cup.
Doumeki had one hand behind him, fingers splayed out, his whole weight resting on his palm. There was a cushion behind him; Watanuki took time picking them out at the store, finding a set which would best compliment both Yuuko’s taste and the room as a whole. Doumeki sat on the ground.
Watanuki’s legs were folded neatly beneath him. His hands stacked one on top of the other. He made himself look at Yuuko, not Doumeki’s knuckles, which were scabbed over. “You don’t need an errand boy. I can get things for us - you.”
Yuuko tapped a fingertip against the teacup and smiled at the shrill sound. “Most things, yes, and you do it well.” Soothing. Soft. A dog’s tone. “But you know those rare occasions when customers have requests that are... harder to come by. Doumeki handles those.”
An old man with a gold-tipped cane came in the week before asking for a book of elementary Russian exercises last seen at the bottom of a steamer trunk in 1954. No, a replica wouldn’t do, it had to be the exact book, with the exact message she’d written on the inside back cover. What was he willing to give- Anything. Anything.
“It’s impossible,” Watanuki had muttered to Yuuko while she flipped through the ledger, found a blank entry and began to carefully write down the man’s name. She ignored him. A week later, when the man came back, he and Watanuki both watched with awe, and not a little bit of fear, as Yuuko pulled a water-stained, age-yellowed textbook from inside her kimono. The old man had cried when he held it. Yuuko’s smile was disdainful in a way only Watanuki could see.
Doumeki brought that package, Yuuko tells him. Doumeki brings them that kind of package, the impossible ones. He’s their archer; he never misses his mark.
Doumeki wasn’t looking at either of them. He was staring out the window instead, at the trees and their bare branches. It was winter, the first time they met. Watanuki keeps forgetting.
“When you are the shopkeeper,” Yuuko told him, tilting her teacup to inspect the soggy leaves, “he is yours to use as you see fit. But for now the shop belongs to me. And you need to treat him well.”
That was the first time it was ever intimated that Watanuki could be Yuuko’s heir; that was the first time he realized Yuuko could have an heir. But Doumeki had just put his bare feet on the clean floor, and so Watanuki wasn’t listening. Later, he would wish he had been. But he wasn’t.
Twenty minutes after coming back from the dead Doumeki is on the back porch, nursing a cup of tea.
(It’s to be expected - he wished for health, and Watanuki’s wishes don’t fail. The dying part isn’t particularly out of the ordinary, either - half of the entries on Doumeki’s ledger page are from gunshot wounds, bare knuckle concussions, that one time somebody garroted him. Doumeki’s talents, the ones which make him especially useful for a spatially bound wish-granter, are also highly sought after by people who pay him to get into situations in which he is shot at, concussed, garrotted. Doumeki knows where secret things are hidden, and people give him money to go and get them. They give him a lot of money.
Once, when Watanuki was feeling particularly kind (drunk), he’d asked Doumeki why he did the things he did when one simple wish - money, as much money as possible - would give him everything he ever wanted. He’d still have Watanuki’s boon to pay, of course, a wish can’t erase a wish, but at least he wouldn’t be risking his neck as much. Doumeki had fixed him with a look that said the answer was plain and if Watanuki couldn’t decipher it, he was a bigger idiot than Doumeki had thought. In lieu of arguing, Watanuki had passed out.)
Watanuki starts off by ignoring him. He’s had a few wishes going all morning that need tending to - two are out of the country, which takes much more concentration, and one involves locating a missing car, which is theoretically easy but practically impossible when the car won’t fucking sit still and let itself be found. And it doesn’t help that the whole time he’s trying to concentrate Doumeki is just… there, staring out at the garden like he always does, polluting the air with his wet dog aura. It’s distracting, in the way that everything Doumeki does is distracting. But Watanuki is used to it by now, in the way human beings and mostly-human beings both can get used to anything if you expose them long enough. Doumeki has become a given. Watanuki doesn’t want to talk about it.
He sweeps out onto the porch ten minutes later, car located, ledger tucked under his arm. Doumeki eyes it before looking back down at his cup. His face is blank except for a slight tic at the side of his mouth, which Watanuki knows means annoyance. Doumeki hates the ledger. He thinks it gives Watanuki delusions of grandeur. Watanuki opens it with a flourish.
“Her name is Sato Nao,” he says without preamble. “She’s an executive assistant at… one of the banks, I don’t know. First job out of college. Her family’s very proud.”
She was surprisingly young, maybe mid-20s, although distinguishing ages has become difficult too. Recent professional, suit jacket-skirt combo so new the tags were practically showing. Her hands flitting between her pocket, where she kept her employee ID, and her eyes, which were watery. The front of the shop is tiny - just the counter and a few shelves with flowers delivered fresh weekly (payment for a B&E record wished clean) but somehow she was the smallest thing in there. If Watanuki still had a heart, it would have ached.
“It may seem silly to you,” she’d said, summoning whatever strength her small body had left to square her shoulders, look him dead in the eyes, “but she trusted me, and I promised her she could. I don’t break promises. And,” posture softening, shoulders going low, “I can’t lose this job.”
Doumeki stays silent. Doesn’t clear his throat, but shifts the cup from his left hand to the right. They’re sitting far enough away that Watanuki can’t really make out what his expression is meant to be. Scary, probably. Disappointed in something Watanuki doesn’t realize he’s done.
He hasn’t bothered to wash the blood away, so that there’s red on his hands and his bare torso, big fingerpaint streaks. Doumeki doesn’t carry any weapons, Watanuki knows. He uses his hands. Watanuki could be dead in seconds if that’s what Doumeki wanted. Sometimes it is. But Watanuki’s still here.
There’s a low mist clinging to the top of the pond, a muggy breeze which will pick up the rain in a few hours time. Watanuki lets the silence rest for a while - starts counting to ten in his head before he realizes how stupid that is - before finally looking up, nodding magnanimously for Doumeki to say whatever he’s thinking.
“She lost her… boss’s money?” Doumeki doesn’t sound… judgmental, exactly, but he’s stopped passing the cup from hand to hand, and his eyebrows are ticked in a way which suggests mild aggravation. “Gambling, or betting? And - you want me to steal it back?”
“No, Doumeki, I’m not one of your clients, I didn’t call you here for… that.” Lip curling into a pitch-perfect Yuuko, but Doumeki isn’t even looking up to see - his loss. “Miss Sato is too good-hearted for that brand of sin.”
Doumeki shrugs. “So? Wish for whatever she lost.” The cup is in motion again.
Watanuki reaches over, places his hand - thin, frail, a few months ago Doumeki said he doesn’t get enough iron and for some reason Watanuki can’t stop thinking about that - over the teacup. It stops in place, Doumeki’s palms still cupped around it. Watanuki’s fingers curled towards his, just a few centimeters left unbreeched.
“You’ll recall that once,” he says quietly, “I explained how difficult it is to locate animals. Elevated heartbeats, lowered consciousness, the previous shopkeeper had her theories but I haven’t delved as deeply. Well. No matter the reason, Miss Sato promised her boss her precious Leo would be looked after while she was on vacation. I’m calling in your boon.”
Doumeki sits in the silence for exactly five seconds before responding: “You can’t be serious.”
Watanuki blinks, which just makes Doumeki’s eyebrow knit deeper. “Why wouldn’t I be? Now, listen, archer, Leo’s a very rare breed. French or something. Miss Sato thinks he was probably stolen by a breeder, apparently her boss gets millions of offers and turns them all down, which I imagine might aggravate.. motivated individuals. If your, you know, powers don’t immediately tell you where he is I’d start with black market-”
“You brought me back to life to find a missing cat.”
Doumeki’s face is doing something complicated and mean. Watanuki leans back to watch. He rubs his thumb over the worn-out ledger spine and wonders if Doumeki would hit him, if he could. He never has before, Watanuki’s pretty sure - the size of those fists, he wouldn’t have recovered. He’s wanted to, absolutely. Maybe someday, if Watanuki keeps talking at him like this, and if he’s very patient, he’ll chase that impulse. Watanuki’s cheek aches for a blow.
“I’m not asking you to adopt him. Just find him. I don’t see what the problem is.”
Doumeki’s frowning, which is the normal human equivalent of punching a hole through a wall. “Watanuki. My job... I’m a… fixer.”
“Assassin.”
“Problem-solver. Not a... cat-sitter.” He sounds genuinely upset. It should make Watanuki nervous. He’s had that thought before.
“Problem-solver, cat-sitter, you’re whatever I ask you to be, Doumeki. You’re the errand-boy. You traded your service for your life,” Watanuki says sharply. “You don’t question.”
Doumeki’s silence tells him it was a cruel thing to say, but Watanuki doesn’t understand why. It was the truth.
When Doumeki finally speaks his voice is set low, so that Watanuki has to focus hard on picking out and understanding each word. ”I’m the only person you let come back here. Past the front of the shop. I’m the only person you talk to.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
Spindly branches rake against the roof. The wind is picking up. Doumeki’s jaw is set. Watanuki looks over the garden. Rain soon, he thinks, so that he doesn’t think about anything else.
(“You think too much,” Doumeki said, “you always do.”
“What,” Watanuki didn’t have a good Yuuko imitation in him yet but he still liked testing it out, the purr and slide of her vowels, the way it made Doumeki’s gaze drop to his lips and then back up, guilty, red-faced, “what are you gonna do about it.”
“Kimihiro…”
Doumeki’s fingers curling - into a fist? No, on Watanuki’s wrist, which he, he wasn’t grabbing, he was holding. Doumeki was holding Watanuki’s wrist.)
Watanuki blinks. The world comes back into focus. Doumeki’s hands are at his side. “Watanuki,” he’s saying. The name in his mouth is proper and correct. If there’s concern in his eyes, it’s only that of an employee for an employer. A lackey for a master. “Watanuki, are you okay?”
“Go,” Watanuki says, before the tenses in his head can shift again. “Go, find the cat, or don’t.” He looks back down at the ledger, opens it to a random page. The ink bleeds together into a solid wash. Doumeki doesn’t move, shoulders and teeth still set hard. He’s trembling like a dog on a leash. Watanuki bites back the urge to- to what? Nothing he says could hurt this man, this patient, pliant stranger. For all the talk of boons and wishes and debt, Doumeki’s actions are entirely his own. He orders Doumeki to fetch, and Doumeki decides to fetch. He tells Doumeki to leave, and Doumeki decides to leave. Whether he comes back or not is entirely up to him. Watanuki, though? Watanuki can dream about the other side of the threshold as much as he wants. It’s never given him anything but insomnia.
Maybe that’s the third reason Watanuki hates him.
Doumeki leaves.
People don’t come back.
It’s part of the magic. Yuuko didn’t understand either, could only speculate that it was some kind of defense mechanism, a way to ensure that the wishes, and the people who made them come true, weren’t exploited. It’s a kind of amnesiac cloudiness that sets in behind the eyes. Once, a man almost ran Watanuki over in the same LFA Yuuko wish into his possession the week before. There was no recognition in the rear-view mirror, just contempt. People wish. They forget. They don’t come back.
“It’s the price we pay,” Yuuko told him. “The price we must pay.”
But why, he remembers asking. At the time, though, it had all been so abstract, so new, that he hadn’t realized it mattered, and so he doesn’t remember her reply. The magic had been new, and so nothing really mattered.
Watanuki used to have a family, he knows that. He used to have friends. Not a lot, and he can’t- can’t really remember their names now, can’t remember if they called him Watanuki or Kimihiro or some half-teasing nickname - but he remembers their laughter. Their hands seeking his. He remembers what it was like, to have people know his name. To exist in this world. To be known to exist.
Doumeki remembers. Doumeki comes back. It’s part of his own magic - finding lost things. That’s another thing Yuuko told him, before she left. Before Doumeki helped her leave.
There’s silence on the cat front.
Which is - fine. Doumeki never checks in about jobs, prefers to drop in at the least convenient moment so that he can be sure to ruin Watanuki’s day, same way he ruins everything else. And Watanuki has other things to keep himself occupied: a kindergarten teacher wishes for the Moscow Ballet’s principal ballerina to break her ankle, and trying to untangle that mess (and then tangle the prima’s laces together) requires much more mental energy than it should have. It takes him a week. Yuuko would have done it in an hour. Whatever.
Miss Sato comes by twice to check his progress. She’s paler each time; Watanuki isn’t sure how long it’s been exactly, but there are new sleep bruises underneath her eyes, stress-wrinkles on her forehead. I’m going to be fired, she tells him. Soon, he tells her. Doumeki remains gone.
And then one night he wakes up to a noise in the garden.
At first Watanuki thinks he’s still dreaming. There’s never noise in the garden. No sound in the whole shop aside from his own breathing and the occasional frog croaking sadly in the reeds. Except he’s awake - and he can feel his breath, its stuttering rise and fall - and still, that noise. A new noise. There’s never anything new.
He follows it out into the garden. (He should have been cautious, but he has wishes and the ledger - what can hurt him?) The sound comes from the pond, which the moonlight turns silver and sharp. Beside it there’s a big figure, not quite hulking, folded over itself like a wounded animal trying to protect its heart. Shivering slightly in the spring breeze. People shiver from blood loss, Watanuki remembers, or when they’re in shock.
He squints to see better, but it’s mostly on instinct. Who else would come back here? Who would even know the way?
“Doumeki,” he calls, “we talked about this. I’m not a hospital.”
There’s a wet stain blooming from Doumeki’s stomach. The moonlight makes that shine too. It spreads faster than last time, but there’s less of it. (Is that good? He left school before they covered first aid, and Yuuko subscribed to the hot tea and leeches school of medicine.) Doumeki isn’t looking at him, but at the ground and the bloodstain growing there, little vines and leaves. The voice that comes out of his cavern of a chest is too soft, barely an echo.
“Didn’t mean to… Sorry- for waking you up. Just. Had a job. Not the cat. Different one. Went bad. I was going to wait until morning. Wait for you back here. And then I’d ask for a wish.”
Usually Watanuki knows what to do with his hands, doesn’t he? He folds them over each other to stop them from fluttering uselessly, or turning into fists. “A hospital.”
“‘M not exactly… Not safe for me. To go anywhere else. - Haven’t paid back the last wish. I know.”
“Shizuka. Shut up.”
He’s never - they’ve never done this back here. There’s a system they have, a carefully balanced give and take. Doumeki comes in the front door when he’s hurt, leaves a counter’s worth of distance between himself and Watanuki’s magic. Watanuki sneers. Doumeki bleeds. He loses consciousness more often than not. Watanuki heals him. Sneers some more. Doumeki makes his pledge. Sometimes they drink tea in silence. Mostly Doumeki just leaves. It’s so familiar right now, the coming, and the distance, and then the leaving.
It’s just a few steps to him, down there in the garden. But Watanuki’s been standing here immobile in the shop for longer than he can say. It’s easier to stay still than to remember what it was like to move. Easier to sink with grace than drown struggling.
Doumeki coughs, and his lips turn red. “K- Kimihiro,” he mumbles, “please. ‘M getting cold.” Watanuki moves.
Doumeki manages not to die while Watanuki’s heating water and ripping up old bedsheets. (“Why would we need bandages?” he remembers Yuuko saying. “Just don’t cut yourself.”) He doesn’t smile when Watanuki kneels beside him on the damp ground, but his grimace lightens a little at the edges.
“Wait until I wash off the blood before you wish,” Watanuki cautions, “it might not be serious enough for the debt.” Doumeki makes a little noise Watanuki’s too tired to interpret.
He works quietly and quickly. He doesn’t know what he’s doing exactly, but he remembers the old medical dramas his mother used to watch after dinner and tries to replicate what the emergency doctors did, and he doesn’t seem to be killing Doumeki any more than the wound. Doumeki follows his lead, staying pliant, biting his lips to keep the hurt noise in. Watanuki’s instincts seemed right: once he gets the wound cleaned up it’s mostly just a mean scratch, much more bark than bite. They’ll get real bandages in the morning, and Doumeki can find medicine wherever he finds things. Worst comes to worst, they can wish it better. By tomorrow, it will be fine.
(That doesn’t make any of this easier. Watanuki’s watched Doumeki’s guts spill out of him, seen his fingers bent back the wrong way. But not where they drink tea. Not where Yuuko would watch the flowers bloom.)
Doumeki sleeps in the kitchen. While Watanuki couldn’t bring himself to offer his own bed, he sort of nodded towards the closet, an invitation for Doumeki to presume. Doumeki had just rolled his eyes, which this morning Watanuki would have taken as bait. But now he just smiles at it, and then turns his head so that Doumeki doesn’t see.
After Watanuki got him pillows and a blanket from what he still calls Yuuko’s room and made a vaguely soft pile in the middle of the kitchen, he’s about to crawl back to his hideout when Doumeki speaks. His voice is still soft, but isn’t weak anymore.
“The cat,” he says. “I’ll have him soon. I’m sorry it’s taking so long.”
It’s the shame in his voice, on top of all of this, the blood, the garden. He still can’t look his way, but Watanuki makes sure he’s loud enough to be heard when he responds, “No, Shizuka. I was just, just fucking with you. You don’t have to… You were right. It’s beneath you.”
Watanuki will never be able to explain the disdain in Doumeki’s voice, although he’ll spend a long time wondering. “No, Kimihiro. I made a wish. A promise. I don’t break those.”
And what else is there to say.
Doumeki’s asleep quickly. He’s a sound sleeper, just a few childish murmurs in the night, but it’s been so long that Watanuki can’t fall asleep with the sound of another person breathing. But he doesn’t mind, even when the morning light starts seeping through the cracks. Doumeki slept steady through the night, which meant that he was alive to do it. It’s a good enough reason for insomnia.
“I’m leaving,” Yuuko said, the night before she did. “You’re ready, and so am I.”
“But-” Logistics got in the way of shock, practicality overriding horror. He hadn’t even dropped his cup. “But you’re bound.”
He had gone outside that morning, he remembers. They had needed milk, so he had gone to the store at the corner, where the grandma who worked there every afternoon when her granddaughter’s preschool got out told him he was growing into such a handsome boy. He hadn’t realized then, of course, but it was the last time he would step out of this shop.
(Three weeks ago her grandson came in to the shop to tell him she’d wanted him at his funeral. He was wearing a middle school uniform. Watanuki had demurred, but politely.)
Yuuko’s eyes had been laughing. (At him?) But the rest of her was deadly serious. She showed him the trunk she had packed, the valuables she had sold, the letters she had sent. She had been planning this, it appeared, for quite some time, and beneath his nose. She hadn’t wanted him to know until it was too late to stop her. Her escape.
“I asked Doumeki,” she told him matter-of-factly, which was also cruelly. “You know his powers, Kimihiro. Our little errand boy, he can find anything. Even a solution to the impossible.”
Doumeki had been in and out more frequently, which Watanuki had thought was strange until Yuuko assured him they just had more jobs than usual. Watanuki still didn’t trust him, but it was kind of funny the way he got so red but stayed so stoic when teased. They weren’t friends, but. But Doumeki had known, and Yuuko had known, and together they’d decided that Watanuki shouldn’t.
“He wanted to,” Yuuko admitted when pressed. She’d look startled, and then thoughtful, that Watanuki had even asked. “But I told him it would be easier this way. For all of us. Kimihiro, you must understand. This is my only chance. You’re so young, but for me - it’s been so long.”
She had been wearing a red kimono with gold and purple dragonflies fluttering up and down the sleeves. Watanuki had been crying. He’d thought he hadn’t known how to do that anymore. Yuuko had been right: he was still so young.
“But,” Watanuki had mumbled, his voice thick and sticky, “what about me?”
Yuuko hadn’t responded. By then she was gone.
The next week Doumeki came into the shop with an unrelated gunshot wound. Watanuki let him bleed for fifteen minutes before healing him. Doumeki hadn’t made a sound. Neither of them did.
In the next week, customers wish for promotions for their sons, engagements for their daughters, a secret forgotten, a murder avenged, free cable for life.
Same as it ever was.
He’s working on the promotion this morning. A simple thing; sitting in the living room with the doors wide open to let the garden breeze drift through, it’s only a matter of tangling up the strings of fate, greed, and money wound tightly around this young man and his old boss. A few tugs here, a snip there, and it’s done. By next month he’ll be Regional VP, and everyone will say it was a matter of hard work and personal responsibility. The young man won’t question it. Nobody’s ever questioned it.
When it was Yuuko doing it, he’d thought it was magic. Bright-eyed, bushy tailed, it had seemed like a dream. Now - now he sleepwalks through miracles.
He’s got his chin in his hand and his attention on the ledger when Doumeki walks in. Watanuki can tell it’s Doumeki because nobody else walks like that, big troll stomps to let the world know he’s here, and he’s not going away. It’s not because he’s posturing - Doumeki’s too dumb for games - he just doesn’t know how to make himself smaller, how to be any less himself. Some people might call that admirable.
He doesn’t at all look like a man who was less than a week ago bleeding to death in Watanuki’s arms. He’s fine. Healthy. In the bloom of life. Got his hair cut recently - must’ve been for another job, Doumeki doesn’t pay attention to that kind of thing and there’s nobody else in his life to nag him about grooming. It makes all his angles look sharper. His patrons like him sharp.
The effect’s kind of ruined by the fish bowl nuzzled in the crook of his over-muscled arm.
“Doumeki,” Watanuki says, looking back down at the ledger with what he hopes is an air of ennui (he doesn’t know what that word means, a customer said it once and he likes the way it sounds), “I assumed you at least knew what a cat is.”
“Shut up,” Doumeki says calmly. He sets the fishbowl down on the counter with surprising care. “Its name is Chilli.”
Watanuki straightens his shoulders, tilting his head to survey first the fishbowl, and then the fish bringer. “You got me a fish.”
“I didn’t get-” Doumeki frowns. He nudges the fishbowl closer to Watanuki; aligns the square base with the counter’s wood grain. “I didn’t get you a fish. Its owner... couldn’t take care of it anymore. And I didn’t want it, so.”
Chilli is - probably some species of fish, Watanuki doesn’t know, he isn’t a marine biologist. It has a body shaped like a marquise diamond, with blood and black-colored scales and a smooth round face. The fishbowl is tiny, just a few neon rocks and a wilting piece of algae Chilli seems wholly unamused by. Watanuki and Doumeki watch it bob up and down and then up again a few times. It’s not interesting, but it’s not not interesting.
“... You got me a fish,” Watanuki repeats.
“If I called it a thank you would you drop it?”
Watanuki’s feeling kind - and he would rather eat his new fish (?) then get into whether or not Doumeki should thank him for not bleeding out in his pond - so he drops it. “Fine. And the cat?”
“The man who stole Leo also had a fish. You were wrong, he wasn’t a breeder, but he knows a few. He sold them the cat. Don’t worry, I know where it is now, it’s being taken care of. But this guy, the thief,” Doumeki smirks a little, like he does when he thinks he’s been clever, “he didn’t seem like a good fish owner, either. And I thought you could use-” He cuts himself off. Watanuki narrows his eyes.
“Use?”
Doumeki looks away in a way that would make anyone else seem guilty. “Lately you’ve been. I don’t know. Company… can be nice.”
If Watanuki had a thousand years experience and a thousand more to plan, he wouldn’t be able to even begin formulating a response to Doumeki Shizuka stealing him a fish because he thought he seemed lonely. So instead he just says: “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Doumeki says. He pauses, and keeps pausing. It’s probably a blessing, that neither of them know what to say.
They stay like that for a while, in the shop, with the fish. Doumeki leans against the counter, his legs kicked out behind him, and Watanuki wonders at their length (until he catches himself and wonders at Chilli instead). When the teapot is empty Doumeki heats more water without being asked, navigating Watanuki’s disaster of a kitchen with practiced ease. He pours for Watanuki first, before himself. The tea is weak, but Watanuki doesn’t mind. They don’t really talk, but it’s nice this time, the silence.
“What I said before,” Watanuki tries eventually - he figures he might as well. “Last time you were here.” He gestures vaguely around so that Doumeki will understand that here means here as they normally are, the counter and all it represents, barrier and warning, and not in the garden, under the blooming trees, blood and moonlight both bright. He thinks does a pretty good job.
Doumeki watches Chilli trace a figure eight through the water. “Be quiet, Watanuki.”
Watanuki is quiet.
Eventually the sky gets dark enough for the streetlights to blink on, a reminder that otside the shop, time insists on flowing. Doumeki’s good-ish mood has been darkening, too. He must have another job lined up - most of Doumeki’s work happens after sundown. Doing what, Watanuki doesn’t know, and won’t ask. Getting things from people. Hurting them. Other things. It isn’t Watanuki’s place to know.
“Well.” Doumeki straightens. Wipes dirt that isn’t there from his pants. Looks at the fish, which bobs placidly. Looks at Watanuki, who doesn’t move. “I’ll be back.”
“With the cat.”
Doumeki scoffs, but more gently than he might have. “With the cat.”
“And,” Watanuki calls at his retreating back, “fish food.” Watanuki knows Doumeki’s rolling his eyes, but he isn’t saying no. A win if Watanuki ever saw one.
It’s probably embarrassing to admit it, but the fish is pretty good company.
No matter what Doumeki might imply, Watanuki isn’t lonely. He’s had... some amount of time to get used to this life, and while he doesn’t love it like he used to - resents, in fact, that kid who threw himself at Yuuko’s feet and begged for the chance to learn, who saw the glint in her eyes and willfully ignored what he knew it meant - despite all that, solitude has become something of a comfort to him. (Because what’s the alternative? No - that’s a thought for the deepest part of night, when it’s impossible to sleep.)
(Once Yuuko, when she was in one of her more inscrutable moods - those came more and more frequently near the end - she told him this was the loneliest job in the world.
They had just helped a young couple, Watanuki remembers. They wanted a healthy child, or an expensive wedding, or something human like that. Whatever it was, the important thing is that it was his first time taking lead. He’d been learning wish-making for over a … long period of time, and finally Yuuko stepped back to make room behind the counter. The thing he remembers most is the realization that more than the rush of magic itself, what he had coveted, and would then begin to crave, was the envy-want-fear on both customer’s faces as he stood behind the counter and made their wish come true. They didn’t know what he had sacrificed, what he had lost, but they wanted to be him, and they couldn’t, and a part of them they hadn’t even realized before then hated him for it.
There are only two people in the world who don’t look at him like that anymore. Well, one, now.
Yuuko’s comment came after she saw that look in his eyes. A teacher’s concerned caution - or maybe, like most wisdom she ever imparted to him, it was just a passing thought fluttering in and out of her head, the flight path inscrutable to all who might comprehend it. No matter what her motive, there was still the small, mocking smile playing on her lips, the red-lacquered nails she rested on his shoulder.
“Watching people be happy, year after year, decade after decade, while you stand back here behind the counter, bound to this shop. You might doubt but I promise that eventually, Kimihiro, you will find yourself wondering why you ever wanted this.”
Watanuki, who had been young, and brash, and who had known what he wanted so much it was a physical ache, responded without hesitation: “Because nobody else gets to have it.” And Yuuko’s smile had grown.
Once, he told Doumeki about Yuuko’s warning. Doumeki didn’t say anything, but he smiled, too, like he understood.)
It’s not like he talks to the fish. That’s important to understand. (It only happens once. Maybe twice.) It’s just… nice. To have something else around. And to, whenever he looks at it, remember that somewhere in the world there’s someone who knows he’s here, and on occasion stops to think of him.
Just kind of nice.
Three days, or months, or years later, something meows at the front door.
There’s a bow around Leo’s neck. Doumeki had it lying around - he refuses to tell Watanuki why - and after he cleaned Leo up he thought he might look good tied around his neck. “Sometimes thing deserve to be nice,” he’d said quietly, ducking his head so he could concentrate on petting Leo’s fur. It means he misses Watanuki’s smile, but that’s fine. To both of their surprise, it’s still there when he looks up.
He sticks around when Sato Nao comes to pick Leo up, lingers on the other side of the counter without asking Watanuki first. She thanks him, too, touching his hand with as much disbelieving relief as she does Watanuki’s. (Doumeki accepts it with much more grace; Watanuki immediately looks for a discreet way to wipe his own off, eventually settling for Doumeki’s pants.)
“I just don’t understand how you were able to do it,” she says, soothing a restless Leo in her arms. “I thought it was over.”
“Well,” Watanuki says smoothly, “we have very good employees here.” Doumeki twitches behind him. Watanuki glances back at him, frowning. “I meant Chilli.”
“And so quickly!” she says, nudging Leo closer so he can examine the fish, who flees to the other side of the bowl. Doumeki smoothly slides it back closer towards himself. “I thought it was going to take weeks, but my boss isn’t even home until next week!”
Watanuki blinks, but before he can stay anything he feels Doumeki’s hand on his hip. The shock of sensation is enough to make him quiet.
She insists on full payment, which is good, because Watanuki does too. After both woman and cat have departed in another cloud of thanks, the two of them (plus the fishbowl) go onto the porch, where Doumeki pours the tea. Summer’s bumping up against a spring reluctant to leave; the garden teems with life and rot and flowers. Chilli bumps up against the edges of his bowl like he’s trying to swim into the dewy grass. Neither of them know exactly what type of fish he is yet, but Watanuki’s thinking about letting him try out the koi pond, see how stretching his fins suits him. It’ll be good to have an excuse to leave the house.
Sato Nao’s last comment still sits like a lead weight at the front of his brain. Time is difficult, lately especially, but he thought - he thought it had been weeks. Years. Something else. “Doumeki,” he says, once the tea has cooled and the silence has become comfortable, “how long have we known each other?”
Doumeki’s hand stills on his cup, where he was chasing a rogue drop of moisture around the rim. “You don’t like it when we talk about time.” (He says it so matter of factly, like he’s picking it from a list of Watanuki Facts he has ordered in his brain from 1-100. Allergic to bee pollen, bad at algebra, terrified of the passage of linear time. Watanuki would be irritated if it wasn’t so strangely thrilling, to be known like that. And that irritates him in a squirmy, itchy-under-the-skin way he doesn’t understand. Stupid Doumeki.)
“Answer the question,” Watanuki snaps without teeth.
Doumeki frowns like he does when he’s trying to think. “Since I first came to the shop… five years? Maybe?”
Watanuki, who had been trying to be Yuuko and cover up and any and all emotion with a well-timed sip, stops mid-air. “Five?”
Doumeki shrugs, although he still looks wary. “Give or take.”
Five years for his mother to die. Five years for his sister to live. Five years for Watanuki to mold, back here, in the dark. He thought it had been longer. He thought it had been so much shorter.
Yuuko hadn’t known how long she’d been alive. Said it was a gauche question, so human, Kimihiro. Watanuki tries to count the years. It takes him longer than he meant to. He hadn’t realized he was becoming used to this. It had just been so much easier to give in.
“But…” He tries to find something to latch on to that isn’t a sob. “But the fish isn’t old.”
It’s infuriating how patient Doumeki gets when dealing with Watanuki. “You’ve only had Chilli for a week. And fish don’t age.”
“They don’t? … Five years?”
Watanuki looks at Doumeki, really looks at him for the first time in a while. He sees the same eyes, steady and unblinking, the same lips, frozen in a perpetual frown. And he also sees a scar bisecting his right cheek that wasn’t there before. An exhausted, gray cast to his skin that doesn’t set in overnight. There are lines between his eyebrows, a tightness in his forehead. The faintest hint of gray in his hair.
He feels like a Xerox-image of himself, slightly out of focus, a lighter ghost-image overlapping the dark edges. Age, which means time, is coming for Doumeki. One day, so soon it will feel like nothing to Watanuki, so soon he might not even realize he’s gone until long after it’s past, Doumeki will leave and not return. And then maybe Watanuki will forget him, too.
He wonders if that’s what happened to Yuuko. If that’s why it was so easy for her to leave him. After so long, people, and their absence, becomes so familiar as to be ordinary.
“Maybe,” he hears the part of him that’s still a solid image, connected to his consciousness by only the barest overlap, “it would be easier if you don’t come back.”
“- What?”
“I mean,” Watanuki replies, softly, almost to himself, “I release you from your boons.”
Glass on wood. A crunch. That was one of Yuuko’s good teacups. It’ll be a bitch to replace. Watanuki has his head turned to watch the branches in the garden sway, so he doesn’t see what Doumeki’s face does when he says: “Watanuki. Shizuka. - Do you think I’m coming back because of the wishes?”
A silence, different than any they’ve shared before.
“Kimihiro,” Doumeki says into it, “do you think I’m coming back because I have to?”
Watanuki, who is a coward, allows himself to only turn his head so that he can see the edges of Doumeki, in case what’s there is too unbearable and he needs to hide away quickly. But it’s just Doumeki, stupid Doumeki, steady Doumeki, who isn’t looking away. Who’s trying to meet him head on.
Watanuki’s already moved through this garden once. He can do it again. It will be difficult - change always is. But this time, just like last, someone will be waiting for him at the end, and cheering him on during every labored step.
“Well then maybe,” Watanuki says, slowly, as he settles back into his body after what seems like a long time away, feels the ache in his back and the stutter in his heart and the parts of himself which aren’t touching Doumeki, “maybe it would be easier if you just don’t leave.”
Watanuki’s never seen the emotion blooming across Doumeki’s face now. Later, he’ll learn to name it hope. “Yeah?”
“Well. Well. I have the space. I don’t know why you’d want to. But, I mean,” and he reaches his hand across the table, slowly, tentatively, telegraphing each moment and giving Doumeki time to respond however he wants, “someone has to feed the fish.”
Watanuki doesn’t know if that’s how time works in the shop. He doesn’t know if the magic will accept Doumeki into its flow, doesn’t know if Doumeki will still be able to come and go, doesn’t know if any of this will work. But he knows that tomorrow morning when he wakes up Doumeki will still be there beside him, because he asked him if they could change together, and Doumeki said yes. It’s enough, at least for today.
A hand touches his. Watanuki looks up from where their fingers interlace, and what he sees there stops him in his tracks.