being troublesome
Soon I will have Cross fic up.
In the meantime, apparently I'll be writing fic for everything else I've ever read. YAY PROCRASTINATION. This promises to be very entertaining for bystanders.
This is xxxHolic fic, and it has Himawari backstory spoilers. I think xxxHolic would be less depressing if I didn't like Himawari, but at least there's always the Watanuki and Doumeki show.
Sunflower
As a small child, she had loved meeting new people.
“They’re like puzzles!” she said, bouncing down the sidewalk, clutching her mother’s hand. “They’ve got pieces and sometimes you can’t find them but then they turn out to be under the table. And you can find them and it fits, and you can see it’s a pretty picture with all the pieces, but it’s a mess if it hasn’t got them. The pieces. It’s fun to find all the pieces for the people. And then you can see the picture.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Himawari,” her mother said with a distracted smile and a half-hidden flinch. “Don’t step in the puddles, love.”
It’s a day she still remembers, though it’s years gone now. Early autumn just after a rainstorm, everything washed clean and crisp and new. She had enjoyed it with all the innocent enthusiasm of a child still young enough to find every perfect autumn day exciting.
Maybe she remembers it because it was the last day she felt clean.
* * *
“You’re cursed, child,” her grandmother said, looking tired and sad and very, very old.
“That’s ridiculous, Mother. Don’t say that, you’ll frighten her,” her father said, but he didn’t look steady as he said it. He looked scared and unsure and young, and if anything frightened her, it was the thought that her father was afraid.
“What should we do, Mother? Is there anything we can do?” her mother asked. She looked tired, too. Himawari wondered if that was how things worked; if bad things made men scared and women tired, or if it was just like that in her house.
She wondered if she’d ever dare to find out what happened in other people’s houses, now.
“I’ll take her to a temple,” her grandmother said. “They’ll know something.”
* * *
Whatever the people at the temple knew, it hadn’t been enough to save her grandmother’s life.
* * *
“It’s a disease, Himawari,” her father whispered into her hair as she cried against his chest. “It’s just a sickness. It’s not your fault, love. It’s not your fault. But you have to remember…it is a disease. If you get too close to other people, they’ll catch it from you, and they’re not as strong as we are.”
“They’re not as lucky,” her mother said, holding her shoulder too tightly. “They’ll never get to know you the way we do.”
* * *
Himawari dreamt of collecting puzzle pieces, of making half of a beautiful picture, only to find that the pieces she had touched were curling and cracking like dying leaves in the fall.
* * *
Her family moved after that. So that she could start over, her parents said. So that she could start over with no friends, they didn’t say, but Himawari heard it.
An account of the things she learned in her new school: history, literature, English, algebra, how to keep people away.
“You’re just fun to be with, Himawari-chan,” said the girl Himawari had thought would be safe enough, just being an acquaintance, and not really a friend. She drowned in a lake the next week. Tragic accident.
“You’re so quiet all the time,” said the soft-spoken boy who sat next to her in math, passing her a pencil she’d dropped. “You seem lonely.” But after three weeks of knowing her, two broken arms, and a death in his family, he said he was sorry they’d ever met.
“Don’t be so angry, Kunogi,” said the enthusiastic sempai who showed her around her new middle school. “What’ll happen is, your face’ll stick in that scowl.” She died, too. A train. Something.
There were others, dozens of others. People she knew, people she didn’t know, people she’d brushed in passing. They didn’t all die. They all suffered, though, and the few who realized she was to blame never forgave her.
She never forgave herself.
* * *
By the end of middle school, Himawari had mastered it. So much cheer it was off-putting. The smile of a happy person who had too many friends to take on another. A laugh that said she didn’t need any help, that she wanted for nothing.
Himawari knew by then that she wasn’t pulling away to protect the people whose lives she might ruin. She was doing it for herself. She was doing it because she was too young to know so many dead people, and she was tired of funerals.
* * *
She tripped and crashed into Doumeki Shizuka during her second week of high school, and waited in dread for the horrible thing that would happen to him.
And waited.
After a month of waiting, she accosted him in the hallway with a smile bright as the sun, and demanded, in the most roundabout way possible, an explanation.
He didn’t exactly explain. Doumeki, she would quickly learn, never exactly explained anything. He did say that he came from a temple family. She decided he must have seen some strange things at his temple, because his eyes were sometimes as old as hers.
A temple family. Temples had never done anything for her.
Maybe that was why she reached out, feeling out of control and dangerous, and wrapped both of her hands around his right arm. She wondered why she couldn’t feel the poison seeping out of her and into everything she touched.
She stepped back and waited. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t otherwise comment.
Nothing happened.
* * *
“I talked to a boy today-”
“Oh, Himawari…”
“And I don’t…nothing I do bothers him. It really doesn’t. I’m sure of it.”
“Engagement. Right now. What’s his name? Who are his parents?” Her mother’s eyes had taken on an alarming gleam.
“Mom!”
“Yes, you should bring him home, Himawari. Let’s keep him!” her father said, peering around the edge of his newspaper with a smile.
“Dad, please don’t be ridiculous.”
“Don’t call your father ridiculous, young lady!” her mother snapped. “He was being perfectly serious.”
“I wasn’t, really,” her father admitted.
“I was being perfectly serious. I want to meet my future son-in-law!”
“It’s not…it’s not like that. He doesn’t like me like that.” And even if he had…even if he had, Himawari knew she was more dangerous the closer someone got to her. She would never let anyone get that close.
“Make him like you. This is no time to start acting your age. Don’t let him get away!” Her mother clearly had no such compunction.
“Mom!”
* * *
“So a middle-aged lady has been following me,” Doumeki remarked calmly, looking out the window at a boy flailing around on the soccer field below.
Himawari smiled her brightest, most oblivious smile. “Oh. Really? How strange!”
“I think she’s your mother,” he continued, eyes apparently riveted to the flailing boy.
“Ah ha ha.” She did take after her mother quite a bit; anyone could see they were related. She’d never had reason to be upset about it before. “Why would my mother be following you, Doumeki-kun?”
Doumeki shifted a little. The flailing boy flailed himself into the chain link fence, and somehow managed to get tangled in it. Doumeki appeared to take courage from this. “You don’t know very many people,” he suggested.
Doumeki had an unfortunate tendency to hit the nail on the head every time.
“She won’t follow you anymore,” Himawari assured him, dropping the cute face. Her mother wouldn’t follow him anymore because Himawari was going to tie her to a chair.
Doumeki shifted again, and Himawari wondered if the conversation was making him uncomfortable. It was so hard to tell with him. It was possible that he was just really interested in the flailing boy, and that was why he wouldn’t look at her. Understandable, if true. The boy had gotten himself clear of the fence now, and appeared to be lecturing it, complete with indignant finger shaking.
“I could come to dinner,” Doumeki said, just after she’d decided he was done speaking for the day. “If that would make her feel better.”
Himawari sighed and leaned her forehead against the window, watching as the flailing boy finished yelling at the fence and marched off the field. “I don’t know whether it would make her feel better or not,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
* * *
Despite her mother’s attempts to get her to cling to Doumeki for life, Himawari never did invite him to dinner; never tried to make him anything more than a friend. It was partly because she was afraid, partly because the habit of distance was too ingrained for her to change it…and partly because Doumeki clearly had his eye on someone else.
Someone oblivious.
The flailing boy turned out to be Watanuki Kimihiro. He never realized that Himawari had met him through Doumeki, which was probably just as well.
Watching them together was addictive, and it became worse once she realized that, as long as Doumeki was there, Watanuki was safe from her too.
Running into them now and again somehow became the occasional lunch, which somehow became lunch almost every day. Watanuki cooked and flailed and screamed at Doumeki. Doumeki ate and stared and sometimes raised an eyebrow.
She was starting to work them out. She’d forgotten how much fun it was. Maybe she’d be allowed to piece these two together without destroying them.
* * *
She came down the stairs on a Wednesday, and saw Watanuki trying to strangle Doumeki, while Doumeki kept an eye on the cup of tea in his hand, careful not to spill it.
A perfectly normal day.
“Take it back!” Watanuki cried.
Doumeki didn’t look away from his tea.
“It’s a lie!” Watanuki insisted.
Doumeki made a choked noise that Watanuki interpreted, probably correctly, as a denial.
“Yes it is!" Watanuki shrieked.
Himawari thought she should step in before he gave himself a heart attack.
“Watanuki-kun and Doumeki-kun get along so well!” she said happily, settling next to Doumeki.
“Himawari-chaaaaan,” Watanuki wailed, releasing Doumeki’s neck. “We really, really don’t!”
They really, really did. Watanuki was kind to Himawari, but Doumeki was the one he went to for help. Doumeki was the one he really trusted.
As it should be.
“I could never get along with someone who says that you can’t cook, Himawari-chan,” Watanuki huffed, gesturing toward Doumeki, who was in the process of stealing most of Watanuki’s lunch. “I had to defend you just now!”
“Kunogi doesn’t cook,” Doumeki pointed out between bites of Watanuki’s food.
“That doesn’t mean she can’t!” Watanuki insisted.
“She can’t,” Doumeki said.
Watanuki shrieked.
It was true that Himawari didn’t cook. It wasn’t that she was incapable, it was just that people who ate her cooking tended to die horribly.
“You might not recover from eating something Kunogi made,” Doumeki explained with perfect honesty and a blank face.
“Don’t listen to him, Himawari-chan!” Watanuki said desperately, waving his arms in front of Doumeki as if to bat the words away. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying!”
She’d never had someone side with her so completely and for so little reason. It was a good feeling, if terrifying.
And then there was Doumeki, who seemed to be teasing her about the way she accidentally killed people. That had never happened before, either.
It was just like having friends. Strange friends, but still.
* * *
She’d hoped she could keep them. She’d hoped so until Watanuki started running into her on his own, and she realized it wasn’t an accident.
Bad things started happening. Of course they did.
But she fooled herself, she hid and denied. When that woman had died in the street, Watanuki’s eyes had been as old as hers and Doumeki’s. He’d seen too much even before she came along. It wasn’t necessarily her fault; he just had a miserable life on his own. Anyway, it would be fine as long as Doumeki was around.
Doumeki tried to be around, but he couldn’t undo damage that had already been done. And Watanuki was persistent. He wouldn’t give up no matter how flighty and unreliable she was, and it was hurting him more and more.
* * *
“I don’t know how to get rid of him,” she wailed, while her mother held her and combed through her hair with nervous fingers. “Oh God, I don’t want to get rid of him, I’m-I can’t-”
“You have to get rid of him, love,” her mother whispered, sounding on the brink of tears herself. “You know you do, Himawari. You know-”
“But Doumeki-kun-”
“Doumeki-kun can’t always be there. Himawari, please.”
“I can’t,” she whispered wretchedly, and her mother’s arms tightened around her shoulders.
* * *
Her mother was right, of course.
She’d gotten too used to having Doumeki around. She’d become complacent, so complacent that she touched Watanuki. She had no idea how she could have gotten so comfortable and stupid. She hadn’t deliberately touched anyone but her parents and Doumeki for six years.
He fell. He fell, and she thought he would shatter into a million pieces, just like the glass. Doumeki rushed to his side, seconds too late.
He hovered for a moment, checking how much was broken, then his eyes tracked from Watanuki’s body up the building, up to the window. He stared at her.
She thought, Neither of you will ever forgive me, because I don’t deserve to be forgiven.
Why did I think I was allowed to have friends?
* * *
“You know there will be a price,” Yuuko said, looking more serious than Himawari had ever seen her. Serious, but not grim. Not angry, and that was a surprise.
Of course there would be a price. She’d nearly killed Watanuki, and he was…special in a way she couldn’t describe, didn’t entirely understand. Of course there would be a price.
If the price was her life, at least this time she’d be the one leaving, and not the one being left.
She lifted her chin with determination, saw Doumeki doing the same.
“I’ll pay anything,” she said firmly. “Whatever it takes.”
Doumeki nodded.
“Very well,” Yuuko replied, with a strange look that might have been either pride or sadness.
I’m not doing this for you, Watanuki-kun, Himawari thought with guilt but no regret. This is for me.