It was not a dramatic day when Watanuki died.
There were no flashes of dying light, no half-visible spirits lingering in the air. It was not his style. Yuuko, now, she'd gone out with a bang—with confetti and fireworks and glittery kitschy plastic stars raining from the heavens. In her best dress. She'd been the kind of person who demanded it, who lived and breathed drama until it was part of her very soul. And she had decided to prove it to the world with her last will and testament. But Watanuki had chosen to go quietly. In the end, the assuredly loudest boy in the world had made no sound at all.
A boy. That was how Doumeki still thought of him, even though the body behind him in the temple had the fine-boned face of an old man. The two of them were still young enough behind their creased skin. But unlike Yuuko, who wrapped herself in beauty to hide her age, it seemed to Doumeki that her heir had done the exact opposite. Watanuki's body was old, but his spirit was young. And no one could say that the creaking bones of old age had dulled his ability to make himself heard.
It was appropriate, thought his lover, that the only thing that could shut Watanuki up was death. And it was also appropriate that the king of melodrama died without the slightest bit of flair, by simply keeling over while cooking breakfast on a warm April morning with no special significance at all. Doumeki had felt all the clichéd feelings, done all the clichéd things, as though they were a normal couple facing a normal tragedy for once in their distinctly abnormal lives. He had rushed to Watanuki's side with a feeling of oh-so-dreaded destiny, forgetting in an instant everything he knew of acceptance and the way of the world. He had cradled the smaller boy's, no, man's head in his arms, tears pouring from his face in just the way they were supposed to, without any dam left to hold them in. This time it was done. This time it was for real.
Doumeki knew. He knew because he had disappeared for three hours on a rainy morning some years ago, found his way to the door of the old seer Watanuki had introduced him to, and asked what Watanuki would not. Sitting on a soft cushion in a room smoky with incense that was neither Yuuko's nor Watanuki's, he had laid his bow at the old man's feet and waited. The seer peered at him with yellowed eyes that betrayed nothing at all.
"Are you sure?" the man asked, lifting the sleek wood with his papery hands. "This is a terrible thing which you ask."
"I am well acquainted with terrible things," Doumeki told him quietly.
"So be it, then" said the seer as the smoke swirled around them like hot breath. "So be it."
Doumeki got up that day as completely normally as he could, refusing to let the medium leave this world with a bad taste in his mouth, his dying day lost to the prescience of the haunted world. He whispered his goodbyes while Watanuki had his back turned, dry tongue rasping over waiting dry skin. He listened in companionable silence while Watanuki ranted and raved over the morning meal, wondering if, when he closed his eyes, the loudmouth's voice would seem any different than it had all those years ago outside Yuuko's shop. (HEY! You ungrateful bento-consuming HOG! (Flail, flail) Don't you know that it's bad manners to eat the food that someone else cooked and make them carry the boxes, too?! ) But most of all Doumeki watched him, fixing the motion in his mind as a watercolor of gangly limbs, once-black hair, and the delicate shape of a blue bathrobe hooked over his lover's slim frame.
He barely registered it when the other boy's shoulders hitched, the nervous motion prompting a sudden sense of déjà vu, and a silent Watanuki pivoted less than a quarter turn before crumpling to the ground with no grace whatsoever.
Heart attack, the doctors said, but Doumeki knew better. It was hitsuzen, come to claim something which had eluded it for many years. And it was hitsuzen that now left an old man, still standing tall but for the cane in his left hand, alone on the walkway on a warm April afternoon. The sun shone disjointedly through the trees at him, as if to point out the world had not stopped or spared a moment of silence in rustling trees for the body in the temple.
It was over. Watanuki was over.
He'd had due warning. Years of it, in fact. And yet it still came crashing down around him today, the concrete reality of loss that threatened to force some expression from his immobile features. He did not move. Watanuki was the only one he'd ever really reacted for anyway. And so Doumeki held the image of his spirit-boy in a thousand poses—jumping, laughing, dreaming, weeping, screeching, mumbling, gasping, staring, babbling, dancing, cooking, smiling, frowning, growling, running, napping, just being—in his mind, and let a smile play behind his lips as he closed his eyes for the last time.
Wherever Watanuki was going, Doumeki would follow.
Outside on the path another figure slouched clumsily to the ground, a hundred yards from the body in the temple, expressionless as always. His still-muscular hands did not reach toward the slender ones he had held once, and there was no sign of any attempt to make a parting gesture. He simply went, the way countless old men go down thinking who-knows-what in their last moments. And the sun kept shining through the trees onto his splayed form.
It was not a dramatic day when Watanuki and Doumeki died.