Prompt table - another one down!
43. Last dance
Watanuki didn't go to Himawari's wedding, of course. How could he?
Doumeki did, of course. How could he not? Regardless of any feelings he might have had concerning Himawari he would still have gone, simply because Watanuki couldn’t.
Everyone agreed it was a beautiful wedding.
Doumeki for his part stoically put up with Himawari tossing the bouquet at him, the giggling and inebriated bridesmaids (sisters and cousins of the groom) hitting on him with increasing fervor and the groom’s stammered assurance that he would take good care of Himawari.
(Doumeki presumed he received the last one simply because he was the only one, excepting her parents and Kohane-chan, who was on the bride’s side. And perhaps also because he always seemed to make the man oddly nervous.)
Once Doumeki thought he had stayed an appropriate amount of time he slipped away, quiet and unobtrusive, and returned to the shop where he for once was greeted by a very enthusiastic Watanuki. Perhaps that was not nice of him, for Kohane-chan’s sake, but sometimes , just sometimes, he wasn’t nice. Not when he wanted to be somewhere else with someone else.
It did not take long for him to piss Watanuki off, naturally. The cheerfulness brought on by the happiness of a good friend wore off proportionally to finding that Doumeki’s answers were entirely unsatisfactory.
The outburst was a given, and that Doumeki didn’t pay any attention to it was a given, and that there was some food (light snacks only, to go with the alcohol) was absolutely a given, and that Mokona bounced around and the twins danced until they were tired and fell asleep on the porch, bathed by moonlight and starlight, under Watanuki’s tender gaze was a given.
And when it was all quiet, and still, and only the cicadas gave them something to contrast the silence with - then he said,
“I saved the last dance for you.”
Standing up from the porch, turning around, looking at the man with the glasses on the veranda - that’s what Doumeki told him. His hand extended in offering, blunt and taciturn as always, but earnest, always so earnest.
That Watanuki would take his hand was a given.
While husband and wife was seen off by laughing well-wishers; while time went by and the world spun as it will; while their companions slept and thousands of millions of others did as well - through that they swayed gently together under the stars.
Prompt table here.