Ophelietta; Don't They Have Payphones Wherever You Were Last Night; T/PG-13
Title:Don't They Have Payphones Wherever You Were Last Night
Author: ophelietta
Summary: Loneliness, drinking, old high school friends that
know too much about you, and the wish you never had to come back home
for Christmas. Doumeki and Himawari have holiday survival down to an
art.
Rating: T for Teen
The prompt:
Doumeki visits Himawari at college. Her dorm
mates and the rest of the world come to all the wrong conclusions.
/CUE ANGST. Secret!OT3.
Notes: Title courtesy of one of the two Casiotone for the
Painfully Alone songs that inspired this, the other being “Cold White
Christmas”. Click, listen, worship, then drink a gallon of whiskey to
burn the loneliness away.
Don’t They Have Payphones Wherever You Were Last Night
Always, he came bearing gifts.
Small beribboned boxes of strawberry mochi in the spring time, cunning
thermoses of cold chrysanthemum tea in the summer, knitted gloves and
scarves and hats in the winter and autumn. Sometimes there were
letters - pale, crisp stationary and graceful, old fashioned
calligraphy - or recipes carefully copied out on stiff rice paper. One
of her house mates, Sato Suzuran, always snatched up these recipe
cards with wonder and went whirling to the kitchen - but her creations
never had quite the same taste, even when the directions were followed
to the letter.
There were other gifts as well. The steady warmth of his hand on hers
underneath the kotatsu her first December away from home; she had
blinked and told herself that her eyes were watering from the steam of
the hotpot, nothing more. There was the comforting scratch of his
tweed jacket against her cheek, when all the other couples went
strolling down the starlit streets of Sendai in wintertime and she
tucked herself into him as if she could vanish herself. And there were
the scents she could inhale from the hand-knitted scarf knotted around
his throat: cedar and sandalwood incense, rustling parchment, and
beneath all of that, a thread of heavy, velvety smoke from a kiseru
pipe.
It was winter in Sendai. He came to her, as he always did, like a gift
in himself. She waited for him on the train platform, her strawberry
lip gloss sticky on cold-roughed lips, cupping together her hands
which were snug in her favourite marigold-coloured gloves. The large,
crocheted petals curled shyly over her wrists, like a lover’s grip.
She knew that the hollow ache in every single one of her limbs had
nothing to do with the cold.
When he stepped out of the train compartment, tall and
broad-shouldered and calm-eyed and just Doumeki, she hugged him
tightly, before there was even time to say hello. She felt him gently
drop his bag of presents, even letting the blue folder of half-marked
term papers slide to the ground, so he could put his arms around her
properly.
She could hear the coos from people passing by - Oh, what a lovely
couple - Hey, why don’t you greet me like that anymore? - In public,
really, have they no shame - and ignored them all. She just
concentrated on hugging Doumeki tightly, as if the space between their
bodies, where a third person lived, could simply disappear.
~
That night, they got drunk at her favourite little pub. Eri’s wasn’t
for the college crowd that flooded most of Sendai, but for the old
timers, the locals. It was smoky and dense and cheap and good, and no
one tried to hit on Himawari. That kind of thing always ended badly,
especially for the men. The hot, sweet sake burned its way down her
throat and she licked the rough sea salt crystals off from the pods of
edamame, trying to think of a way to tell Doumeki that she wasn’t
going home with him, this time, or maybe ever again. The alcohol made
her slow and sleepy and loose and warm, and the words got lost
somewhere around the third round.
Leaning against each other, they walked back to the house she shared
with six other girls. It snowed almost silently as a million fairy
lights lit up the trees down the main avenues downtown, a forest of
starlight shining in the darkness. If there were any chance of her
ever falling in love with Doumeki, it should’ve happened then, on a
night filled with winter magic made even more beautiful by the
alcoholic haze. When they got in, Sato and Tanaka were in the kitchen,
talking quietly over mugs half-filled with half chocolate, and by the
way they fell silent when she appeared in the doorway, she knew they
had been talking about her.
“We lost track of time, and Doumeki-kun missed the last train back to
Tokyo,” Himawari said, speaking slowly and carefully to avoid
slurring. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but this was
probably the most drunk she had been while phrasing her request that
wasn’t really a request. “So he’ll be staying the night.”
Tanaka opened her mouth in protest, but Sato levelled a look at her
that made the younger girl just snap her mouth shut and put down her
mug with a little more force than necessary.
“You know where the extra futon and blankets are,” Sato said
placidly. Tanaka fished a handful of marshmallows out of the half-open
bag and stuffed them in her mouth, chewed furiously as if to keep
herself from ranting, refusing to look at Doumeki. Himawari bid them
both good night.
She spilled birdseed into the little turquoise dish by Tanpopo’s
perch. He chirped once, drowsily, and then tucked his head back
underneath his wing. She and Doumeki undressed each other slowly as
children just learning what clothes were, figuring out how to slip
open buttons and loosen ribbons. They shed jackets and scarves and
gloves and shoes and felt lighter with every moment, as if they were
shedding themselves. Doumeki helped her pull on her nightgown, not
even blinking at the sight of her in her slip, and she hung his suit
jacket and his button down shirt - he had gotten on the train directly
from work, as soon as the last class of the day was done - off the
back of her only chair.
In the darkness, they breathed together, her and Doumeki and always,
always one other person whose name never left her lips. He shifted his
arms, she folded her knees. She held his hands in her own, absently;
they were cold. His feet were warm though, in their thick socks, and
she needed exactly one guess to figure out who had made knitted them.
Later on, she wouldn’t remember if she managed to murmur a drowsy
“good night” before she fell asleep.
She woke up to find her own pale hands wrapped around Doumeki’s
throat. What surprised her, distantly, wasn’t that her hands shook,
but that they didn’t. They were sure and steady and knew precisely
what they were doing, just as well as Doumeki seemed to know. He
looked up at her, not with fear or anger or panic, but with complete
and open knowingness - with sadness, too, but also with something that
may or may have not been love. She knew without having to ask that he
was already forgiving her for this. They always did. And maybe that
was the hardest thing of all, harder even than the curse itself.
When the shine left his eyes and his entire body fell still beneath
her, she leaned forward. She had cut off her hair a long time ago;
there was no need for the long curtain of hair to hide the scars
crisscrossing her back as she changed for gym class, not anymore,
since high school was over (but was it ever really over?). But here
was still enough of her hair left to fall forward and brush his face
as she very carefully angled her mouth against his. His lips were
smooth and very warm, and she marvelled at how anyone who knew him for
longer than five minutes could think of him as cold.
Then she was opening his eyes and pushing the dead, doll-like weight
of her now lifeless body off of her - off of Doumeki’s body, rather.
The Himawari-body looked very sad, really: too skinny and too pale,
with a dark halo of curls that couldn’t hide the thinness of the face
it surrounded. A sad, empty body in a childish nightgown decorated
with daisies. She had always been indifferent to it, her home for
twenty long and mostly lonely (except for those brief bursts of
happiness, so bright that they hurt her eyes) years, but now that she
was free of it, she could find some charity for it, her poor abandoned
flesh.
Still, she didn’t bother to arrange the body, before she left. Let it
look natural. Let Tanaka and Sato walk in, let them do the screaming
and the crying and frantically try to breathe life into it again. She
was glad to be done with it. Doumeki’s body was large, calm,
confident, and solid, balanced and grounded like tree roots, like
mountains; she felt herself filling it out perfectly, without the
blanks or gaps or cold numb spaces that she felt when inhabiting her
own body.
With Doumeki’s long, steady strides, she made her way to the train
station, knowing that after this simple two hour train ride, she would
walk into a shop that sometimes could and sometimes couldn’t be seen,
and that she would be able to sink into the touch of someone who
existed for her almost entirely as a ghost; mourned and remembered and
dreamed of and cherished, but impossible to meet in her real and
waking and present life, except for a single day of the year that was
always too slow in coming and over far too soon when it did. For
Himawari, in Himawari’s body, he could only exist for her as the
thread of a voice saying I love you on the telephone, a sheet of paper
trembling with ink, the tender friction of her gloved fingertips
rubbing together, the sweetness of the strawberry at the heart of the
mochi bursting on her tongue, as a shape filled in with the fragments
of her flawed and flickering memory. But in Doumeki’s body -
She could see his smile already, and it burned in her mind like a
white flame, far brighter than the parade of starlight that lit up the
streets of Sendai.
~
Shizuka woke somewhere around four or five in the morning, stone cold
sober. Kunogi was sitting upright, her knees drawn up to her chest,
compact as a doll. The scars climbing up the nape of her neck
flickered silver in the half-light, and her hand felt cold and fragile
in his. When he reached up to touch her face, the tears dripped
steadily and mechanically from her cheek to his fingers. He drew a
cool line down her face, and then sat up to hold her in his arms. She
shifted, settling against him like a baby bird stirring in its egg.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was thin and worn and wound too tight, a
strand of hair wrapped around a bone. “I had a dream.”
He stroked her curls, springy beneath his hands. He didn’t ask if the
dream was a nightmare or not. Sometimes, he knew, it was hard to tell
the difference.
And she said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry that I hate you sometimes.”
Her curls pressed back against his fingers. Her breathing was shallow
and painful, as if her beating heart was exposed to the open air of
the winter dawn.
“It’s just jealousy,” she whispered. The bone rolled away, taking the
strand of hair with it, unravelling in the darkness that was almost
light. “It’ll pass.”
“Kunogi,” he said, and then that sounded wrong, so he said,
“Himawari,” because that was Watanuki called her, and that was how he
knew her now, too: by her absence from Watanuki’s life, by Watanuki’s
absence from hers. “You know, I don’t hate you.”
“I know. That’s because you’re an idiot,” she said, but he saw her
mouth pull itself up and down in a happy-sad smile, like the bow of a
violin. “The both of you. I think that’s why you always got along so
well.”
They kept talking after that, but the conversation slid gradually into
a sort of unreality. They talked about things that had happened and
would happen, and some things that never happened at all. They were
silent for long stretches of time as well. He had a craving, at some
point, for a clove cigarette, the kind that Grandfather used to smoke.
She fished out the pack and the lighter from his jacket pocket, and
lit it for him, and he was only faintly surprised to see her take one
for herself. He draped his jacket over her thin, bare shoulders, and
she shrugged into it, the edges overlapping the hem of her nightgown
while smoke tumbled from her mouth. He thought, later, that he
remembered her singing very softly, sweet and hoarse, and that it
sounded like birds rustling their wings. But that might’ve been a
dream too.
They fell asleep with her lips half-fallen against his collarbone. In
the morning, the tears in her kiss had dried from his skin, and her
hands were finally warm, cradled in his.
~
They woke up late to a table of breakfast dishes covered by Sato to
keep them warm, and to Tanaka’s silent disapproval.
“She’s usually much nicer,” Himawari apologised, pouring him tea,
once her house mate had backed out of the kitchen, still giving
Doumeki the evil eye.
“She thinks I make you cry,” Doumeki half-explained. He sipped his
miso soup with enviable grace. “The phone calls.”
“…Oh.” A thread of rosy colour crept up Himawari’s throat as she
fiddled with her chopsticks. Not that it was anything new, but it was
just… it was Doumeki, and people had talked for years. It was
her own fault if she had never bothered to gently correct them. No
dictionary that she could get her hands on had, as of yet, invented
the words for what precisely they were to each other. She then decided
to stop caring about the whole thing, propriety be damned, merely
setting her shoulders, and letting out a firm, “I see.”
Doumeki just quirked his eyebrow. He probably did see. She felt
another burst of inordinate fondness for him wash over her.
At the train station, he pulled along one of her brown suitcases, the
one with the squeaky right wheel. As they ran towards the closing
train doors, they held hands through knitted gloves. They slid into
the doors at the very last second, Tanpopo trilled three liquid notes
as his claws dug into the wool of her jacket, the rest of the
compartment stared at their flushed cheeks and bright eyes, and for
a moment, she could almost pretend that she was happy.
During the train ride, Doumeki marked research papers with his free
hand. The red pencil went swishing calmly through the black type, and
she found her eyes drawn to the motion, letting her mind drift instead
of being swallowed by the numbing terror of going back home.
Watching Doumeki mark reminded her all over again at how they were
supposedly “grown ups”. How time had touched them, carrying all but
one of them along. Sometimes she wondered if, like Alice, it hadn’t
all been a dream: if she wouldn’t wake up to find herself toasting
Yuuko-san in the park with yellow and pink confetti caught in her
curls, or handing over her hair ribbons to two high school boys
awkwardly standing outside her house in the rain. It was strange now,
to think of those times, when a blue-eyed smile had made everything
bearable. Even with the gruesome monsters and deadly vegetation and
inexplicable school hauntings and sadly smiling ghost women and cursed
artefacts and the constant, paralysing terror that, any day now, his
instinct for self-preservation would kick in and he would finally,
finally leave her behind - even with all of that, she had been happy.
It hurt her, now, to think of how happy she had been.
She had been wilfully unconsciousness of that happiness, too. It was
too dear, too fragile, too precious to put a name to; as soon as she
did, she thought it would just blow away. There had been homemade
lunches and strawberry sherbet and cheering at archery competitions
and talking in between breaks and long walks after school and hands
curled around cups of tea in coffee shops. There were cherry blossoms
drifting into pale cups of sake during moon viewings and walking so
carefully while wrapped in the cool length of her yukata and dark
purple butterflies weaving drunkenly through the heavy summer air and
ghost stories told in a round and the fierce bloom of fireworks
shuddering into the sky and a voice she loved better than almost
anything in the world saying sweetly, through the haze of pain and a
dreamy, half-drugged sleep, I’m happy I met you, Himawari-chan.
And everyday she kept smiling as if all of it were ordinary, as if she
wasn’t always more than half-ready for all of it to be taken away. She
had thought herself so wise to the world already, seeing how loving
her hurt all the people around her, and she had been arrogant enough
to believe that when he finally wised up too, she’d be able to walk
away without being destroyed. She had been blind and selfish and happy
and she wanted more than ever to be that again, to be fifteen and - in
a way that she wouldn’t be able to understand until much later -
absolutely free.
But that wish was an impossible one, magic shops notwithstanding. She
knew, now, in a way that she had only thought she knew back
then, that she could never go back again to a time when she knew
nothing.
“Almost there,” Doumeki murmured against her hair, startling her out
of her unexpected nap.
~
He dropped her off at her parent’s home around eleven in the morning.
On her doorstep, she held onto him, knowing it was childish and yet
unable to let go.
“You’ll come back tomorrow, right?” she murmured against his jacket.
“I have his present already, and yours, and Mokona’s and the twins’,
I’m just… I don’t feel like digging around my suitcase right now.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. His chin rested comfortably on the top of her
head and he seemed content to let her hang onto him.
“I’ll come to the temple on New Year’s,” she said, knowing now she
was talking just to be talking. “My parents too. Oh, and the New
Year’s card, remind to give you that too, to drop off.” She could
imagine that bafflement of the postal workers if she tried to drop off
a postcard for a magic shop that existed somewhere in between
dimensions, or on all of them simultaneously. What would she even
write on the address?
“Mmm-hmm,” Doumeki said again.
She knew, intellectually, that she would have to let go eventually.
She knew this the same way that she knew that her parents were
probably spying at her from inside the house, with her mother just
barely managing to keep her father from leaping through the front door
and tearing out Doumeki’s throat. The same way that she knew that if
her feet were to follow a certain, heavy, smoky-sweet smell in order
to find a certain shop, she would find nothing but a vacant lot in the
empty embrace of cold grey office buildings. The same way that she
knew that Doumeki was a person, a human being, and not just a love
letter to be passed between two people who couldn’t see each other.
The same way she knew that Doumeki loved the both of them enough not
to mind as he keep drifting back and forth between them over the long
days of the winter holidays - and over the months, and over the years.
“Doumeki-kun,” she said, her voice very small and scratchy, “I really
do love you, you know that, right? Even when I hate you. Beneath all
of that, I love you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “I know.”
~
Walking home from Himawari’s, snow tangling in his hair, he remembered
something that she’d mentioned about those infamous phone calls - the
ones that Tanaka mistakenly thought were from Doumeki.
The last words Himawari and Watanuki say to each other before they
hang up are always I love you and never goodbye.
Himawari told him, once, that she and Watanuki agreed never to say goodbye.
finis.
Author: ophelietta
Summary: Loneliness, drinking, old high school friends that
know too much about you, and the wish you never had to come back home
for Christmas. Doumeki and Himawari have holiday survival down to an
art.
Rating: T for Teen
The prompt:
Doumeki visits Himawari at college. Her dorm
mates and the rest of the world come to all the wrong conclusions.
/CUE ANGST. Secret!OT3.
Notes: Title courtesy of one of the two Casiotone for the
Painfully Alone songs that inspired this, the other being “Cold White
Christmas”. Click, listen, worship, then drink a gallon of whiskey to
burn the loneliness away.
Don’t They Have Payphones Wherever You Were Last Night
Always, he came bearing gifts.
Small beribboned boxes of strawberry mochi in the spring time, cunning
thermoses of cold chrysanthemum tea in the summer, knitted gloves and
scarves and hats in the winter and autumn. Sometimes there were
letters - pale, crisp stationary and graceful, old fashioned
calligraphy - or recipes carefully copied out on stiff rice paper. One
of her house mates, Sato Suzuran, always snatched up these recipe
cards with wonder and went whirling to the kitchen - but her creations
never had quite the same taste, even when the directions were followed
to the letter.
There were other gifts as well. The steady warmth of his hand on hers
underneath the kotatsu her first December away from home; she had
blinked and told herself that her eyes were watering from the steam of
the hotpot, nothing more. There was the comforting scratch of his
tweed jacket against her cheek, when all the other couples went
strolling down the starlit streets of Sendai in wintertime and she
tucked herself into him as if she could vanish herself. And there were
the scents she could inhale from the hand-knitted scarf knotted around
his throat: cedar and sandalwood incense, rustling parchment, and
beneath all of that, a thread of heavy, velvety smoke from a kiseru
pipe.
It was winter in Sendai. He came to her, as he always did, like a gift
in himself. She waited for him on the train platform, her strawberry
lip gloss sticky on cold-roughed lips, cupping together her hands
which were snug in her favourite marigold-coloured gloves. The large,
crocheted petals curled shyly over her wrists, like a lover’s grip.
She knew that the hollow ache in every single one of her limbs had
nothing to do with the cold.
When he stepped out of the train compartment, tall and
broad-shouldered and calm-eyed and just Doumeki, she hugged him
tightly, before there was even time to say hello. She felt him gently
drop his bag of presents, even letting the blue folder of half-marked
term papers slide to the ground, so he could put his arms around her
properly.
She could hear the coos from people passing by - Oh, what a lovely
couple - Hey, why don’t you greet me like that anymore? - In public,
really, have they no shame - and ignored them all. She just
concentrated on hugging Doumeki tightly, as if the space between their
bodies, where a third person lived, could simply disappear.
~
That night, they got drunk at her favourite little pub. Eri’s wasn’t
for the college crowd that flooded most of Sendai, but for the old
timers, the locals. It was smoky and dense and cheap and good, and no
one tried to hit on Himawari. That kind of thing always ended badly,
especially for the men. The hot, sweet sake burned its way down her
throat and she licked the rough sea salt crystals off from the pods of
edamame, trying to think of a way to tell Doumeki that she wasn’t
going home with him, this time, or maybe ever again. The alcohol made
her slow and sleepy and loose and warm, and the words got lost
somewhere around the third round.
Leaning against each other, they walked back to the house she shared
with six other girls. It snowed almost silently as a million fairy
lights lit up the trees down the main avenues downtown, a forest of
starlight shining in the darkness. If there were any chance of her
ever falling in love with Doumeki, it should’ve happened then, on a
night filled with winter magic made even more beautiful by the
alcoholic haze. When they got in, Sato and Tanaka were in the kitchen,
talking quietly over mugs half-filled with half chocolate, and by the
way they fell silent when she appeared in the doorway, she knew they
had been talking about her.
“We lost track of time, and Doumeki-kun missed the last train back to
Tokyo,” Himawari said, speaking slowly and carefully to avoid
slurring. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but this was
probably the most drunk she had been while phrasing her request that
wasn’t really a request. “So he’ll be staying the night.”
Tanaka opened her mouth in protest, but Sato levelled a look at her
that made the younger girl just snap her mouth shut and put down her
mug with a little more force than necessary.
“You know where the extra futon and blankets are,” Sato said
placidly. Tanaka fished a handful of marshmallows out of the half-open
bag and stuffed them in her mouth, chewed furiously as if to keep
herself from ranting, refusing to look at Doumeki. Himawari bid them
both good night.
She spilled birdseed into the little turquoise dish by Tanpopo’s
perch. He chirped once, drowsily, and then tucked his head back
underneath his wing. She and Doumeki undressed each other slowly as
children just learning what clothes were, figuring out how to slip
open buttons and loosen ribbons. They shed jackets and scarves and
gloves and shoes and felt lighter with every moment, as if they were
shedding themselves. Doumeki helped her pull on her nightgown, not
even blinking at the sight of her in her slip, and she hung his suit
jacket and his button down shirt - he had gotten on the train directly
from work, as soon as the last class of the day was done - off the
back of her only chair.
In the darkness, they breathed together, her and Doumeki and always,
always one other person whose name never left her lips. He shifted his
arms, she folded her knees. She held his hands in her own, absently;
they were cold. His feet were warm though, in their thick socks, and
she needed exactly one guess to figure out who had made knitted them.
Later on, she wouldn’t remember if she managed to murmur a drowsy
“good night” before she fell asleep.
She woke up to find her own pale hands wrapped around Doumeki’s
throat. What surprised her, distantly, wasn’t that her hands shook,
but that they didn’t. They were sure and steady and knew precisely
what they were doing, just as well as Doumeki seemed to know. He
looked up at her, not with fear or anger or panic, but with complete
and open knowingness - with sadness, too, but also with something that
may or may have not been love. She knew without having to ask that he
was already forgiving her for this. They always did. And maybe that
was the hardest thing of all, harder even than the curse itself.
When the shine left his eyes and his entire body fell still beneath
her, she leaned forward. She had cut off her hair a long time ago;
there was no need for the long curtain of hair to hide the scars
crisscrossing her back as she changed for gym class, not anymore,
since high school was over (but was it ever really over?). But here
was still enough of her hair left to fall forward and brush his face
as she very carefully angled her mouth against his. His lips were
smooth and very warm, and she marvelled at how anyone who knew him for
longer than five minutes could think of him as cold.
Then she was opening his eyes and pushing the dead, doll-like weight
of her now lifeless body off of her - off of Doumeki’s body, rather.
The Himawari-body looked very sad, really: too skinny and too pale,
with a dark halo of curls that couldn’t hide the thinness of the face
it surrounded. A sad, empty body in a childish nightgown decorated
with daisies. She had always been indifferent to it, her home for
twenty long and mostly lonely (except for those brief bursts of
happiness, so bright that they hurt her eyes) years, but now that she
was free of it, she could find some charity for it, her poor abandoned
flesh.
Still, she didn’t bother to arrange the body, before she left. Let it
look natural. Let Tanaka and Sato walk in, let them do the screaming
and the crying and frantically try to breathe life into it again. She
was glad to be done with it. Doumeki’s body was large, calm,
confident, and solid, balanced and grounded like tree roots, like
mountains; she felt herself filling it out perfectly, without the
blanks or gaps or cold numb spaces that she felt when inhabiting her
own body.
With Doumeki’s long, steady strides, she made her way to the train
station, knowing that after this simple two hour train ride, she would
walk into a shop that sometimes could and sometimes couldn’t be seen,
and that she would be able to sink into the touch of someone who
existed for her almost entirely as a ghost; mourned and remembered and
dreamed of and cherished, but impossible to meet in her real and
waking and present life, except for a single day of the year that was
always too slow in coming and over far too soon when it did. For
Himawari, in Himawari’s body, he could only exist for her as the
thread of a voice saying I love you on the telephone, a sheet of paper
trembling with ink, the tender friction of her gloved fingertips
rubbing together, the sweetness of the strawberry at the heart of the
mochi bursting on her tongue, as a shape filled in with the fragments
of her flawed and flickering memory. But in Doumeki’s body -
She could see his smile already, and it burned in her mind like a
white flame, far brighter than the parade of starlight that lit up the
streets of Sendai.
~
Shizuka woke somewhere around four or five in the morning, stone cold
sober. Kunogi was sitting upright, her knees drawn up to her chest,
compact as a doll. The scars climbing up the nape of her neck
flickered silver in the half-light, and her hand felt cold and fragile
in his. When he reached up to touch her face, the tears dripped
steadily and mechanically from her cheek to his fingers. He drew a
cool line down her face, and then sat up to hold her in his arms. She
shifted, settling against him like a baby bird stirring in its egg.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was thin and worn and wound too tight, a
strand of hair wrapped around a bone. “I had a dream.”
He stroked her curls, springy beneath his hands. He didn’t ask if the
dream was a nightmare or not. Sometimes, he knew, it was hard to tell
the difference.
And she said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry that I hate you sometimes.”
Her curls pressed back against his fingers. Her breathing was shallow
and painful, as if her beating heart was exposed to the open air of
the winter dawn.
“It’s just jealousy,” she whispered. The bone rolled away, taking the
strand of hair with it, unravelling in the darkness that was almost
light. “It’ll pass.”
“Kunogi,” he said, and then that sounded wrong, so he said,
“Himawari,” because that was Watanuki called her, and that was how he
knew her now, too: by her absence from Watanuki’s life, by Watanuki’s
absence from hers. “You know, I don’t hate you.”
“I know. That’s because you’re an idiot,” she said, but he saw her
mouth pull itself up and down in a happy-sad smile, like the bow of a
violin. “The both of you. I think that’s why you always got along so
well.”
They kept talking after that, but the conversation slid gradually into
a sort of unreality. They talked about things that had happened and
would happen, and some things that never happened at all. They were
silent for long stretches of time as well. He had a craving, at some
point, for a clove cigarette, the kind that Grandfather used to smoke.
She fished out the pack and the lighter from his jacket pocket, and
lit it for him, and he was only faintly surprised to see her take one
for herself. He draped his jacket over her thin, bare shoulders, and
she shrugged into it, the edges overlapping the hem of her nightgown
while smoke tumbled from her mouth. He thought, later, that he
remembered her singing very softly, sweet and hoarse, and that it
sounded like birds rustling their wings. But that might’ve been a
dream too.
They fell asleep with her lips half-fallen against his collarbone. In
the morning, the tears in her kiss had dried from his skin, and her
hands were finally warm, cradled in his.
~
They woke up late to a table of breakfast dishes covered by Sato to
keep them warm, and to Tanaka’s silent disapproval.
“She’s usually much nicer,” Himawari apologised, pouring him tea,
once her house mate had backed out of the kitchen, still giving
Doumeki the evil eye.
“She thinks I make you cry,” Doumeki half-explained. He sipped his
miso soup with enviable grace. “The phone calls.”
“…Oh.” A thread of rosy colour crept up Himawari’s throat as she
fiddled with her chopsticks. Not that it was anything new, but it was
just… it was Doumeki, and people had talked for years. It was
her own fault if she had never bothered to gently correct them. No
dictionary that she could get her hands on had, as of yet, invented
the words for what precisely they were to each other. She then decided
to stop caring about the whole thing, propriety be damned, merely
setting her shoulders, and letting out a firm, “I see.”
Doumeki just quirked his eyebrow. He probably did see. She felt
another burst of inordinate fondness for him wash over her.
At the train station, he pulled along one of her brown suitcases, the
one with the squeaky right wheel. As they ran towards the closing
train doors, they held hands through knitted gloves. They slid into
the doors at the very last second, Tanpopo trilled three liquid notes
as his claws dug into the wool of her jacket, the rest of the
compartment stared at their flushed cheeks and bright eyes, and for
a moment, she could almost pretend that she was happy.
During the train ride, Doumeki marked research papers with his free
hand. The red pencil went swishing calmly through the black type, and
she found her eyes drawn to the motion, letting her mind drift instead
of being swallowed by the numbing terror of going back home.
Watching Doumeki mark reminded her all over again at how they were
supposedly “grown ups”. How time had touched them, carrying all but
one of them along. Sometimes she wondered if, like Alice, it hadn’t
all been a dream: if she wouldn’t wake up to find herself toasting
Yuuko-san in the park with yellow and pink confetti caught in her
curls, or handing over her hair ribbons to two high school boys
awkwardly standing outside her house in the rain. It was strange now,
to think of those times, when a blue-eyed smile had made everything
bearable. Even with the gruesome monsters and deadly vegetation and
inexplicable school hauntings and sadly smiling ghost women and cursed
artefacts and the constant, paralysing terror that, any day now, his
instinct for self-preservation would kick in and he would finally,
finally leave her behind - even with all of that, she had been happy.
It hurt her, now, to think of how happy she had been.
She had been wilfully unconsciousness of that happiness, too. It was
too dear, too fragile, too precious to put a name to; as soon as she
did, she thought it would just blow away. There had been homemade
lunches and strawberry sherbet and cheering at archery competitions
and talking in between breaks and long walks after school and hands
curled around cups of tea in coffee shops. There were cherry blossoms
drifting into pale cups of sake during moon viewings and walking so
carefully while wrapped in the cool length of her yukata and dark
purple butterflies weaving drunkenly through the heavy summer air and
ghost stories told in a round and the fierce bloom of fireworks
shuddering into the sky and a voice she loved better than almost
anything in the world saying sweetly, through the haze of pain and a
dreamy, half-drugged sleep, I’m happy I met you, Himawari-chan.
And everyday she kept smiling as if all of it were ordinary, as if she
wasn’t always more than half-ready for all of it to be taken away. She
had thought herself so wise to the world already, seeing how loving
her hurt all the people around her, and she had been arrogant enough
to believe that when he finally wised up too, she’d be able to walk
away without being destroyed. She had been blind and selfish and happy
and she wanted more than ever to be that again, to be fifteen and - in
a way that she wouldn’t be able to understand until much later -
absolutely free.
But that wish was an impossible one, magic shops notwithstanding. She
knew, now, in a way that she had only thought she knew back
then, that she could never go back again to a time when she knew
nothing.
“Almost there,” Doumeki murmured against her hair, startling her out
of her unexpected nap.
~
He dropped her off at her parent’s home around eleven in the morning.
On her doorstep, she held onto him, knowing it was childish and yet
unable to let go.
“You’ll come back tomorrow, right?” she murmured against his jacket.
“I have his present already, and yours, and Mokona’s and the twins’,
I’m just… I don’t feel like digging around my suitcase right now.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. His chin rested comfortably on the top of her
head and he seemed content to let her hang onto him.
“I’ll come to the temple on New Year’s,” she said, knowing now she
was talking just to be talking. “My parents too. Oh, and the New
Year’s card, remind to give you that too, to drop off.” She could
imagine that bafflement of the postal workers if she tried to drop off
a postcard for a magic shop that existed somewhere in between
dimensions, or on all of them simultaneously. What would she even
write on the address?
“Mmm-hmm,” Doumeki said again.
She knew, intellectually, that she would have to let go eventually.
She knew this the same way that she knew that her parents were
probably spying at her from inside the house, with her mother just
barely managing to keep her father from leaping through the front door
and tearing out Doumeki’s throat. The same way that she knew that if
her feet were to follow a certain, heavy, smoky-sweet smell in order
to find a certain shop, she would find nothing but a vacant lot in the
empty embrace of cold grey office buildings. The same way that she
knew that Doumeki was a person, a human being, and not just a love
letter to be passed between two people who couldn’t see each other.
The same way she knew that Doumeki loved the both of them enough not
to mind as he keep drifting back and forth between them over the long
days of the winter holidays - and over the months, and over the years.
“Doumeki-kun,” she said, her voice very small and scratchy, “I really
do love you, you know that, right? Even when I hate you. Beneath all
of that, I love you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “I know.”
~
Walking home from Himawari’s, snow tangling in his hair, he remembered
something that she’d mentioned about those infamous phone calls - the
ones that Tanaka mistakenly thought were from Doumeki.
The last words Himawari and Watanuki say to each other before they
hang up are always I love you and never goodbye.
Himawari told him, once, that she and Watanuki agreed never to say goodbye.
finis.