Summary: Nothing would be born from it, but it was still worth keeping, wasn't it? (Doumeki; rough symbolics and an egg.

Disclaimer: I do not own xxxHolic.

Pairings: Himawari/Watanuki, Doumeki/Watanuki (onesided)

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The sun shines over the crisp fog of the morning, melting frost into dew, and the grass is wet under their feet, Himawari and Watanuki and Doumeki. Doumeki watches as Watanuki slips just before he reaches the cement pathway and goes down in a mass of flailing limbs and unpleasant curses with a little less of their usual vigor.

Doumeki keeps the egg close, wrapped in a robin's-egg-blue wash-cloth from his bathroom cabinet and stored inside of a small box he used to use to store his old school papers in from the years before. He remember's Yuuko's face when she gave it to him, cryptic and wry, and the weight of her voice cast patterns of breath in the air, where it was cold from inside the shop, where the windows were open. Doumeki had assumed then that Watanuki had done-so, looking for fresh air in the shop that was dusty and old and as breathless as the old yellowed pages of oxygen-deprived books he keeps in the library of his shop, smelling of the fingers that touched them decades before.

Watanuki switches between complaining purposefully loudly about Doumeki's presence all the way up to Himawari and Watanuki's classroom, where they separate, and giving wide smiles to Himawari whenever she makes any particular comment. "You should be less loud." is Doumeki's parting statement, and Watanuki makes a frustrated click of his tongue, and Doumeki does not pause to look back where Watanuki's fingers brush Himawari's as they share answers on their homework, or how they smile at each other so secretly, without any secrets needed to be had.

Tampopo chirps from Himawari's shoulder, a short, clipped dismissal to him as he walks away, sweet-sounding and accidentally taunting, but quietly so, so that he strains his ears to hear it, strains his fists.

As Doumeki walks the fifty-six steps it takes to get to his own class, he remembers the smell of the fresh winter air and the way Yuuko's fingers had left the distant smell of sake on the egg as she gave it to him. The wind that blew in smoothed the ends of her hair against his shoulders and arms and hands as he'd taken it, and it had felt heavy, like there was something inside.

She had told him nothing would be born from it, nothing living and breathing with a sweet voice or a sunflower name, nothing to say to him that Watanuki was closer than the accidental brush of fingertips, the clenching of shirt fabric in between fists when angered or frustrated or desperate for some sort of touch. It had felt heavy, the egg, as Yuuko told him that nothing would come from it, but to keep it with him, because it meant more than he thought. Even if there would never be anything from it, it had meaning, purpose, worth.

Doumeki looks back once to watch Watanuki smile, and at that angle, Himawari disappears around the corner and it looks as though-- as though Watanuki is not smiling at her, but at Doumeki, from a very large distance that is so much closer than it seems. A distance that is purposeful.

The egg is still heavy in his bag. Nothing would be born from it, but it was still worth keeping, wasn't it?