Author's Note: xxxHolic belongs, not to me, but to CLAMP. The ideas that fitted this fic together, however, are mine. Written for the prompt of night: a nightmare at the LJ community 31days on LiveJournal.

If You Wish

She had stepped into the shop like an ordinary student, glancing about cursorily before dismissing the sights as something out of the mind of an eccentric. Watanuki had forgotten how the shop looked to someone who did not spend 99 of his life there cleaning up after a Witch who had apparently never learned to do it for herself, but he felt certain that it deserved more than a mere darting stare around before she turned towards the woman standing in the middle of the floor.

Beside him, wrapped in black silk and trailing velvet, Yuuko smiled. "Welcome to my shop."

The girl, sodden, nodded as one accustomed to the fawnings of shopkeepers and said, "I need--"

"Your name," the Witch went on, "is Setada Ryoganju. You live at 117 Doutenki, the third floor of the building, apartment 306." At the girl's astonished expression, she grinned, held her hand out to examine her glittering nails, rigid as a cat's. "You are surprised."

"I didn't expect a trinket-seller to be stalking me." The girl responded, tightly. "I came to buy something from you, not to be predicted and made a show out of."

Yuuko's mouth moved again, curling. "You are afraid."

Setada jerked stiffly, unwillingly, spoke the word as if she were surprised at what the syllables in her mouth had morphed to become. "Yes."

"Well." In one sinuous movement she rose, ivory and water twining together to make something solid and smooth as marble. "Come."

Setada hesitated, blinked in a long, worried movement at Watanuki, went.

Outside it was raining. The world darkened to a few, imprecise shades, all faint and lazy greys, beiges stranded in threads of colour through the crumbling black dirt, the overshadowed skies. Yuuko's fingers extended through it, light-cutting and narrow like edges of knives. "What do you see?"

"The rain." Setada began, and stopped, eyes waning away into suspicious lines. "That's not what you were asking."

"You came here for a wish." Yuuko said with cold grandeur. "Does your wish relate to the rain?"

"Don't make fun of me." the girl snapped. She flinched away sharply as the witch turned towards her in a sweep of robes that pooled out over the floor, rivulets of silk and shimmering lace turning fluidly to match her precise movement.

"I'll do whatever I like. My wishes do not concern me."

"You're wasting time, and I have places to be," the girl began.

Yuuko spoke, and the words formed as if they had been made before either had spoken, stringing out and reining back the rest of Setada's sentence carelessly.

"The night is coming."

Setada blinked again, hooking a spindle-thin hand over the crooked softness where her neck touched her shoulder. Watanuki, watching, saw the bones convulse fleetingly, hold and stem the shiver that trilled up her spine. "I know." She managed after a moment; her breathing was regular and paced, and that gave the lie away more than any other sign. "Then I'll keep it short. I need something for good luck. This looked like a nice trinket shop, I thought there must be something here that would relate to dreams..."

Yuuko put her hands together, tip to tip in spindly lines. "So it's a dream you want."

"Yes."

"What will you pay for it?"

Setada's lip curled, teeth locked against each other in a snarl. The feeling was familiar to Watanuki, enough so that he recognized its mirror in her expression: the realization that she had been carefully manipulated into this situation and was still being puppeted as if she could not think for herself. "What do you want me to say? I have money, is that what you want? Name your price."

Yuuko smiled a lazy shuttered smile, leaned a thin elbow against the wooden beam as the rain roared down around them. "Why don't you tell me what you would give for it? Not money," she said as the girl half-raised her small change purse, "but something of value to you. Something that could not be replaced if it was taken."

The girl laughed thinly, and the sound made it clear that the entirety of the shop was unreal to her: stepping from the middle of the pavement into a dream. "What do you want me to say? Everything?" She scoffed and shook her head. "I would give up everything if the dream I need was real. I would kill for it; no man or woman could be safe if they were my price. I would... I would die for it." Her chin lifted then, bones pushing thin and stark against her skin, quills without ink making letters across the surface that he could not read. "Does that count?"

Yuuko half-closed her eyes, made a slow, pleased sound against a background of tumultuous thunder and storm. "That might do." She said, and gestured expressively towards a vase that Watanuki had never seen before, set at the edge of the wooden porch. "Put your hand inside," she instructed, "and take out the first thing that you touch."

Calmly, arrogantly, Setada strode towards it, plucked the jar lid free and plunged her hand into it. Her features had been carefully collected into expressionlessness, edged with scorn as she drew her hand out again, heavy with two bags; one caught securely in her palm, the other drawn out by way of a blue string looped around her little finger.

Yuuko bent, untangled the blue bag and held it up to the rainlight; it shimmered softly in folds of silk and spiraling embroidery whose meaning he had no idea of. "This is the one you want."

"And how do you know which one I want?" She clutched the other one, her mouth a defiant shape and strangely bloody against her soaked pale skin.

The Witch shrugged slowly. "Both will give you what you asked for."

"This is ridiculous." Setada snapped. Watanuki watched as she pulled herself out of belief, the suspension leveled back into a solidity of feet-against-the-ground, head-in-the-dirt. "I'm arguing with a shopkeeper over whether I should buy something or not. I suppose that one has a greater price than this one."

"You may find it a greater price than this one. But the blue one will wake you."

"And the red one?"

"The red one will give shape to your dreams."

"This is useless." Setada said. She raised her hand, palm riveted with tiny lines as she held the red bag. The stitching ran on beneath her palm like blood, distorted and mirror-dark, as if the blue bag in Yuuko's hand had been reflected in a tinted glass. Around her, the tangles of fate's threads condensed. "I'll take this one."

Yuuko smiled.

-

He carried a cup of sake (her first of the evening) into the wooden room to which she had retired after the one customer of the day, claiming that she had been exhausted by the bartering.

("What bartering," he said, "when you did all the manipulating?"

"Exactly!" she said, and looked at him graciously. "It's so hard to keep up when you have to think for both sides against an extremely clever opponent!"

"Yourself?"

She tilted her head languidly, a you-said-it-not-me expression.)

"I thought I did the scenario rather well." She said cheerfully, turning to beam at Watanuki. Her voice dropped, liquid syllables sharpening into the jagged mimicry of a very bad American accent. "Take the red pill, and you can go back to your own dream world. Take the blue pill, and you can find your reality at last." She tilted her head, apparently intrigued by this balance. "Or perhaps it was the other way around."

"WHAT DID IT MEAN."

"It means," Yuuko decided, fingers tapping against her chin thoughtfully, "that we should have sake!" She smiled at Watanuki brightly. "Arrange it, Watanuki! We have a celebration to get on with!"

"Yes, but what did it--"

"More sake!" One of Yuuko's ubiquitous girl-assistants chimed in from behind, hitting him neatly on the head with a pillow. "Now, now, now!"

"Very nice aim." he heard Yuuko say admiringly to the child as he stamped out of the room in search for alcohol that the witch hadn't consumed yet. But despite the familiar smouldering irritation (she couldn't simply leave them all over the house and restrain herself from drinking them at all hours of the day?), there was a faint prickling thought, and the memory of her name, her address, burning at the back of his mind like a guttering flame.

-

In the dark he clenched his fingers over the doorknob, and paused. Yuuko's other customers had never bothered him before, though he suspected that she had cheated them as blatantly as was possible for a slinky woman in a black dress to cheat people. Few of them had felt as this girl did, as if a needle had struck on the muscle beneath the bone, present and unclear like a ghost, hovering, three steps back.

And even if he had not seen the familiar smoky chains coalescing around her, he would have understood it implicitly. It had been in her eyes, somehow, the promise that things would go awry, and he could not have been certain that he was wrong without going to look. It would not take long; Yuuko would not miss him.

He opened the door, went out into the courtyard, and past.

Five minutes later, cursing the invention of branches and twigs that could be effectively stuck in one's trousers for several minutes on end, he stumbled out of the neighbor's bushes again and out into the street, trying not to think about how he had managed to walk into a hedge when the sidewalk glittered in the aftermath of rain, lucently bright.

The flaring of an ember-tip on the porch; smoke like herbs, burning, wafted out into the night as Yuuko watched him go.

It began to rain.

-

Third-floor apartments, Watanuki reflected, were horrible places to live. If she had lived on the first floor, he would have only had to worry about crouching in bushes and the unpleasant sensations thereof. But, as she lived on the third floor, he had had to concern himself with the worrying thought that a branch sticking awkwardly up would leave a long and question-inspiring scar down his leg.

He had managed to get to the top of the tree, at least, but the next set of branches would be too spindly to hold his weight. And even if he thought that he might be able to hide the scrapes of the night from Yuuko until they healed, Watanuki suspected that even his patron, drunk as she usually was, would notice if he split his skull.

Darkly, he kicked the tree. It promptly overturned its leaves and showered cold water on him.

"...been out of bed when I told you not to, haven't you?" A girl's voice, and familiar enough that it took him only a moment to register it: Setada, from the shop, who had taken the red bag and not Yuuko's advice, and had left before anything dire could fall upon her head in Watanuki's sight.

A second voice responded in an indecipherable murmur, warm and distinctly male with a light note, instilled like grace.

This was something private, and Yuuko might have had no qualms about watching but Watanuki did, particularly as the girl had only to glance up out of her window to see Watanuki: Boy Wonder Pressed Against the Glass. So he bent, awkwardly, feeling the branches dig coldly into his sides as he clung by his fingertips to the windowledge and listened.

"You're not too sick, I hope?"

"Never. It's always only a little cold, only a little fever. I suspect all of the decent diseases have run off in fear of you."

"As they should." She said fiercely, and he chuckled low in his throat.

"I can just imagine you," he told her, sleep thick against his tongue, "with a bright bandanna wrapped around your head, wielding a broom and beating away any diseases that might come near me. You shouldn't worry so much over small sicknesses."

"I'm not worried about sicknesses." She snapped at him. "But I did used to worry, before I knew."

He laughed; the sound shook with the crispness of new paper, laminated pages flicking against each other in a smooth rote. "If not about my being sick, then about what?"

"That I loved you." she said. "That you had loved me, once, and in our silence and denials we had stumbled and missed each other in the dark."

The creak of bedsprings, singing out in a faint noise drowned by dark and thunder as someone leaned over. "I could never miss you." The dry boy inside said huskily, much to Watanuki's annoyance. Of course he could waste time being romantic while he was dry, and Watanuki did not know why he was still there, eavesdropping on a romance that did not concern him. "You, of all people, should know that I would give up everything for you. I would kill for you; no man or woman could be safe if they were my price. I would die for you, too, if you wanted it."

The words sounded too familiar, distorted by voice and rain to become something strange again, but the memory of them burned. He tried to think of where he had last heard them...

"Isn't this fascinating?" said Yuuko to his side.

-

"What did you do to that bag?" He hissed. The rain made the same sharp noise, beading crystal and silver over his glasses to bend his sight into blurs and blindness. "What did she want?"

Yuuko curled her fingers over his shoulder, tightly, so that he could not move away. The storm had robbed her of her warmth; her skin had turned to resilient marble, and her eyes glowed with the liquid quality of onyx. "I offered her the right bag." She said, low and amused. "She had only to take the one I had given her, and it would have been the right dream."

His shoulderblades pressed back against each other, the flesh between them cold and cramped. He pronounced each syllable carefully, as if they were knifepoints. "What did you do?"

She lifted her hand, pressed it briefly against his throat as her nails tilted his chin upward. "Look." she instructed him, and Watanuki did.

At first he could see nothing. The room was bare and still, painted with thin shadows that slid over the papered walls and the girl beside the bed. But as she moved forward to speak with a faint, moving smile, he saw her eyes, empty as coloured glass, flicker lovingly over the features of the boy who had spoken, the boy in the bed.

But there was no one there.

"Isn't it nice," said Yuuko, without irony or care, "what love can make you do?"

Watanuki stared. "I don't understand."

She gestured carelessly; an unfortunate drop of water snapped against the glowing tip of her pipe and evaporated in a thin hiss. Her slender legs swung against the branches absentmindedly as she watched the spectacle playing out beyond the windowpanes as if it were a theatre performance. "A girl, in love with a boy who does not return the feeling. She pines, she weeps, she goes looking for something that will grant her wish for happiness."

He set his teeth and tried not to sound impatient: Yuuko, creature of whimsy, might decide that it would be much more amusing to flutter away then and leave him to make his wet, dark way back to the shop without answer or an umbrella. "But what does that have to do with the bag you sold her?"

"That bag has not been paid for yet." Yuuko said mildly, examining the point of her pipe in which there was no ash. "She will pay me in full when this is over, with whatever she has left." Her mouth twisted lightly, eyes like stone. "I suppose you could say that I've given it to her."

"What does that have to do with the bag you gave her, then?"

She tucked the slender reed back into the corner of her mouth, drawing in a slow breath before exhaling in grey curls that writhed in the air like words before dissipating. "The bag I gave her is a rare little trinket; she would have spent the rest of her life paying her debt to me if she had used it. It shows the truth you least want to know, and the one you need most. It would have told her all that she did not want to know about the boy."

"And what did she pick?"

"What girls always choose - the dream of romance. It's convenient, if you know how to use it."

Enigmas and riddles, but one by one the pieces were snapping into place, the edges of their borders fading as if they had never been. "And?" He said.

Yuuko breathed a misty ring at him. In the midst of his choking she said, "In your mind you know your price for everything. The bag will give you the dream you want if you will give up what is held in your mind as the price."

He opened to ask what she had that she could exchange for that fleeting dream, but Setada's face, angled through the window, caught his eye then, and he turned. Her face, clear-cut and pale as the crescent moon hung in the sky by a thread, gave him all the answer that he needed in a sting of memory.

What would I give up for him? What would I not? I would kill for him... I would die for him...

"What are you standing there for?" He demanded, hoarsely. "Save her. We still can, can't we?" But Yuuko only looked at him, her eyes opaque as smoke and stone.

Out across the city, a bell began to toll in long, sonorous notes: one, two, three, four, five...

The glass stood between them, and he watched as she reached out towards a building shimmer nestled between the blankets of the bed, and perhaps (six) it was only a gleam of moon against the skylight, he would think later, and perhaps it was not, but he knew only that his coward's sense - much more accurate and useful than the sixth sense that he was slaving away to have Yuuko remove - was shouting for him to get away, to run (seven) and think no more of the girl with the narrow, dark eyes, the strange snapping way of speaking, the dream bag cradled between her hands.

(eight, nine, ten)

The least logical thing to do, his brain informed him in cold and certain terms, would be to leap through the glass to catch her, to snatch away the dream bag before the last note struck.

(eleven)

So he did.

(Twelve.)

-

He remembers: the distant throb of starry fragments glittering against his body, in his blood his mouth his eyes his hands, needles biting as he catches hold of silk and thread, dreams. He catches sight of her face in the jagged edges of the broken glass; empty with shock and dismay. Perhaps it is the thread of blood laid against his cheek that disturbs her - it curves against his face: a fissure, the beginning of a cracking mask.

It's all right, he begins to say, wishes he were gone and suddenly the world warps, the doors open and blank as the faces of a handless clock around him as he slips into the dark.

The dreams spin out around him like a whirlpool, and the eye of the storm catches him in turbulence as he watches the sights spiral out: Himawari, hair lying like the flats of swords across her back, her face opened up in a smile (no); Domeki, subservient, humble, sweeping the grounds of temples across Japan (no); Yuuko, a strange and sober woman in a stiff-necked upturned collar and a business suit with horn-rimmed glasses; an ordinary life with teachers who take interest in him but do not fawn, with people - live people - who smile and speak to him, and dead people who take no more interest in him than they do in breathing.

No.

And it's as if the word has brought the dream to life: speech rolls across his thoughts in coils like music, inexorable in the sound, a wakening symphony. This is what could be, this is what is.

No.

How do you know?

No.

You have forgotten, buried in the midst of these dreams, what reality is. Reality is Himawari waiting at the park, head cocked slightly in looking for a lanky dark-haired boy whom she loves. Reality is Domeki, who will never amount to more than a sweeper; Yuuko with her airs who is only a small shopkeeper.

No.

This is what you want.

This is what I wanted.

Wishes cannot be denied.

Wishes can change.

The price will be paid.

The price has been paid.

Your price.

There is nothing you have that I want, now.

And there was nothingness, then, with only the faint hope that he would be left in peace, never to wake again.

-

"SAKE!"

He sat up, an action made perfectly clear to him by a sudden chorus of protests from his spine, his skin, and his muscles.

"OW." He said coherently.

"No," Yuuko said reproachfully, sitting down on his injured legs as she drew out a bottle and examined it with her thin fingers. ("OW, GETTOFF GETTOFF GETTOFF, YUUKO.") "it's 'sake', not 'ow'. Have you lost your memory?"

Watanuki snorted, turned his head away. "I wish."

"Do you really?"

"It's too early in the morning to be playing word games, Yuuko."

"It's never too early in the morning to play word games." She replied cheerfully, and bounced up and down. ("OW. YUUKO. REMEMBER WHERE YOU'RE SITTING.") "And in case you're wondering, the girl survived for me to exact my price from her."

He twisted back, sharply. "And?"

Her brows quirked, fingers flexing over the sake. "Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

"If I had known that you'd want stories about it," she mused, "I would have been much less cruel. It sounds so terrible when you explain to someone the things you do for boredom." Catching his murderous eye, stopped short by the fact that he was confined to a body that had only recently had the last of the glass splinters removed, she smiled coolly. "I took her obsessive love from her. It's a very interesting specimen; I don't think I've seen anything like it even among the immortals. Ah, but it's probably to be expected. For obsessive behavior beyond that of the immortals, look no farther than the modern teenager."

He bent his head, examined the sheets, and tried to think of a way to get out of the situation without saying It. But It twisted on his tongue, bent it backward and squeezed speech from it. "Thank you."

"You owe me several more years of work for this." She told him. "All for a girl who won't even remember your name, come Tuesday the next year."

"I know." He scowled, and she smiled.

("And while we're here!" she added, and began to pour out a generous amount of sake.

"This is a recovery room!" he snapped. "Put that away!"

"Don't be jealous." Yuuko remonstrated, smiling beatifically. "You may have some too, if you wish.")

end