Notes: For those of you up to date with the more recent manga chapters, incredibly, this was not inspired by the events from chapter 132 – in fact original version was finished and posted over at my LJ weeks before that chapter ever came out (which certainly made reading that chapter when it did come out a more interesting experience for me). Contains one reference to something revealed in volume 6, but no major (intentional) spoilers other than that.

Doumeki has never been one to have what people think of as normal dreams for a teenaged boy. Perhaps those he has normal for someone brought up all his life in a shrine, and who spent his childhood with a man who exorcised spirits and held some old-fashioned ideas about child raising, but it would be fair to say such people are rare enough that 'normal' would hardly be a good term for them anyway. For the most part, Doumeki doesn't pay his own dreams much mind. They don't often tend towards gruesome nightmares, semi-conscious panic involving exams or appearing at school in one's nightclothes, nor even random acts of hormones. By morning he forgets most of what he dreamt about, and once awake, doesn't make much effort to remember the rest.

Occasionally though, there are exceptions.

Getting to know Watanuki, for example – that's far weirder material than even most real dreams of his have ever come up with. Believing in the supernatural aspects never gave him any trouble, but understanding that Watanuki's become such a constant piece of his life – that's been a little harder. It was a long time before that ever sank in far enough that he stopped half-believing he could wake tomorrow to discover Watanuki Kimihiro and all his entourage had all been one elaborate dream themselves. What really sets Doumeki's dreams apart is how often they are, if anything, more mundane than his waking life – often those dreams seem to forget the fact he knows Watanuki at all.

The point of this is to explain that Doumeki has had dreams like this before. The difference is that any other time, there's always been something that told him it wasn't real.

The event started like any other normal morning. He woke, dressed, and took himself to school without experiencing out of the ordinary. He didn't see Watanuki on the way, but that wasn't unusual (or as Watanuki would have put it, he does not need to be chaperoned just to make it down the street, damnit! And he's already making Doumeki lunch, so what the hell does he think he needs Watanuki owing him any extra favours for? In the interests of fairness, if, hypothetically, Doumeki had offered to walk Watanuki to school his reasoning would have been nothing like that, but it wasn't an argument worth the effort).

The school felt unusually quiet that morning. Doumeki didn't really notice at first – not until it was five minutes before the bell and it struck him that he still hadn't seen nor heard the slightest sign of Watanuki yet, and given that someone who makes as much noise as Watanuki can usually be heard coming a mile off, this was strange. He could have been running late, but it wasn't like him to be less than punctual (even when he gets chased by spirits he usually manages to get chased in the right direction, and arrives early if anything). Suddenly curious, Doumeki went to investigate.

At the doorway to the other classroom he nearly walked right into Himawari.

"Good morning, Doumeki-kun," she greeted him, startled but no less polite for it.

Doumeki peered past her, but there was no sign of the bespectacled boy he'd come to look for. "Is he not here today?" he asked.

Himawari looked blank. "Is who here?"

Before Doumeki could get far enough past the strangeness of that answer to formulate a response, a friend had called her away. It was starting to seem like Watanuki really was absent that day, but Doumeki took one more look around the classroom just in case.

At Watanuki's desk sat a girl Doumeki didn't recognise. From the way her books were spread over it, it didn't look like she had any intention of moving to make way for the usual occupant before the day started.

The bell went then, and for the first time that morning, Doumeki started to worry.

Concentrating in class was harder than usual. He heard what his teachers said and copied it down in a mechanical manner, but his mind kept wandering. It was possible Watanuki was home sick with nothing worse than a cold. It was possible Himawari misunderstood him when they spoke earlier. It was possible that seating arrangements had changed in Watanuki's classroom lately.

He still couldn't shake the feeling that Watanuki's name hadn't been called on the roll that morning.

The girl at a desk right next to his got called on by the teacher for a question, and Doumeki realised belatedly that he needed to pay attention.

It didn't much help. Most of his classes that day passed in a blur.

Himawari had a late lunch (or one of those excuses) and he didn't see her at lunchtime, although even had he seen her he still wasn't sure yet what he should have asked her, or whether he should say anything at all. He bought lunch at the school canteen. It was decent food, as school lunches go, but to him it tasted of nothing much at all.
Doumeki did not go home after school, not even to drop his books off, he went to Watanuki's apartment and knocked on the door. When it opened, there was a middle aged woman in work clothes standing there – another stranger. Doumeki had to invent a quick excuse about a wrong address, but that did give him the chance to check how long she'd been living there, and whether perhaps another occupant had only recently moved out. The woman assured him she'd been living there for years.

This was a whole hay bale past the final straw. Doumeki's next stop was Yuuko's.

He didn't remember much about walking to the shop later on, but he'd been that way before enough times that there was no reason it should leave an impression. The lot looked as empty to him as it ever did when he arrived, but he wasn't leaving without answers either, so he set his back against a gatepost and waited for the universe to get sick of him.

He didn't remember the wait much either, but once again, there couldn't have been much about it that bore remembering. What he did know for sure was that it was a good while before he glanced over a shoulder towards the gateway and saw Yuuko was there. Her arms were folded, though not so as to make her posture openly challenging. The dress she wore was long and black, and were Doumeki inclined to take much notice, he'd swear the trailing skirt changed shape more quickly than the breeze could explain.

"Something I can do for you Doumeki?"

Doumeki was positive there was no possible way she could not already know, but when you play against Yuuko you play by her rules. "Where is he?"

"Ah, Doumeki, always so reliable," said Yuuko, with a mysterious smile. "We should have expected you couldn't be convinced to forget his existence so easily as the rest of the world, not even give the evidence of your own eyes."

Doumeki frowned. "What's happened to him?" He told himself that there was no reason why someone else referring to Watanuki's existence as a fact should be a relief, or a surprise.

"That, I fear, I cannot tell you," Yuuko answered him. Any trace of that smile was gone now. "Suffice to say this – he is far away, in such places that cannot be reached easily. Whether he makes it back or not is a matter that must be left entirely to his own accord. We cannot interfere."

"Why not?"

"Because that is what has been decided upon. Because decisions made by others bind us as surely as our own, and those are the rules."

As cryptic as Yuuko was being, Doumeki thought he understood as much as he needed to; at least as much as he'd be allowed.

"There's nothing I can do to help?"

Yuuko raised her eyes to the sky above them – or maybe, knowing her, much further away. "You can go on remembering him," she suggested. "Or, if he does not return, you can forget him; the way everything else you see around you has."

It was a moment before Doumeki realised she was waiting for him to respond. "I don't think I could do that," he admitted.

That got him another slight smile, the one which, going by previous use, meant that once again he was behaving exactly as she should have expected from him. "We'll have to see. It might become easier than you think, given time. But all you can do for now is wait."

Doumeki didn't see her disappear again. All he was aware of was a buzzing sound, and then there was a bug flying into his face and he was trying to wave it out of his eyes. By the time it was gone, so was she.

If she was ever there at all. It was then that that Doumeki realised that his back was getting stiff from leaning on the gatepost and that the sun had long since set, and that he couldn't entirely rule out the possibility that he'd nodded off standing up there.

So Doumeki did the only thing he could. He went home and went to bed, and waited to see which version of the world would be nothing more than a dream by morning.

When Watanuki walked into class the next day, grumbling about homework and today's lunch menu as though nothing remotely out of the ordinary had happened, Doumeki had to pause and watch for a bit, just to make sure that this time, he knew for sure this was real. There was certainly no evidence to suggest otherwise. If the events of the previous day had happened at all, they'd been erased so cleanly that even Doumeki found himself experiencing a flicker of doubt as to whether he could trust his own memory. He went on watching until Watanuki turned back to see him doing it, and gave him a glare like a full set of kitchen knives. "What the hell do you think you're looking at?!"

"It's all over?" Doumeki asked him. "Everything that happened yesterday?"

"You are perfectly welcome to make your own lunches if you think tracking down the ingredients is so trivial!" Watanuki snapped, in what may or may not have been a deliberate misunderstanding.

"You make it back alright then," Doumeki said, ignoring him.

"What?" said Watanuki, though he didn't seem all that interested in finding out, judging by the way he was already starting to turn away again.

"Oi," Doumeki called to stop him before he could get far, caught Watanuki's gaze and held it. He wasn't going to risk what he had to say being misunderstood. "Next time, don't cut me out of things."

Watanuki gave him a defiant glare. "I have no idea what you think you're on about."

"I mean it," said Doumeki, deadly serious. "Don't forget."

The look Watanuki's gave him less than subtly impled he thought Doumeki was going crazy, but he didn't say anything else. A minute late the bell rang to let them know was time to go to class.

Doumeki hasn't had another 'dream' that real since. He isn't rightly sure what he'll do about it if he ever does. It isn't something he has any way to prepare for. He's not nearly arrogant enough to assume that there's nothing the spirit world can deal to him – or to Watanuki – that he can't deal with, or that Yuuko's warning that he could forget Watanuki the same way the rest of the world once had done is something that could never come to pass. For that matter, he still doesn't know for sure whether any of it was ever real – perhaps he could ask Yuuko, but the price is guaranteed to be more than he can afford.

What he told Watanuki the morning after it was over though – that much he's sure about, regardless of whether Watanuki himself remembers it or not.