Chapter Two: Help!Watanuki
Watanuki slammed open the doors to Yuuko's shop.
"Help! Doumeki's been kidnapped by tiny, furry businessmen!"
There was no-one in the shadowy, ornate interior, except for one solitary spider which liked to spin webs in the high curlicues of the crimson frame of a garish ornamental screen. He ignored his eternal enemy for now, kicked off his shoes, and ran through the building and out to the back garden, where Yuuko and Himawari lounged on the veranda watching the rain, and Maru and Moro and Mokona, wrapped in yellow plastic raincoats, splashed happily through the puddles and wet grass.
"Help! Doumeki's been kidnapped by tiny, furry businessmen!"
Yuuko languidly sipped sake from a delicate porcelain dish. In the small walled garden, Maru and Moro and Mokona barely stopped their rain-soaked game of tag to glance his way. Only Himawari dropped the end of Yuuko's black braid that she was holding and pressed her hands to her mouth in alarm. That was because Himawari-chan was a lady of grace and sensibility who understood the import of this kind of statement. A tiny yellow bird flew out from under her hair as if to punctuate her alarm. But wait - Himawari-chan was in the shop? In Yuuko-san's clutches! Himawari's soul was in imminent danger of being extracted by heartless and insane fortune-tellers! Noooooo!!
"You're dripping, Watanuki," said Yuuko gently.
See? Heartless.
"We don't have time for this!" he exclaimed. "They swarmed all over him – they were rabid! - and knocked me away. Then they shoved him into this really tacky little mini with a furry tail dangling off the antenna and piled in after him and drove away tootling their little horn!
"I tried to stop them," he said to Himawari, his mouth thinning to an unhappy line. "I really did."
She nodded minutely, her grave eyes taking in the grazes on his hands and the mud and rips on his coat.
"But don't you want to recount your adventures through all the spooky-spiritual sites set like beads on a string about the backside of Japan armed only with an antique camera?" Yuuko quirked her fine straight eyebrows in hurt. "You don't even want to tell me about the onsen in the mountains?"
"Nothing happened at the onsen hot springs," said Watanuki. "Nobody scrubbed my back, not even that crazy Russian guy with the wrinkles. Doumeki broke his arm because he fell out of a tree and was an idiot. That is all. Which brings us back to the matter at hand. Help?"
"Did you bring souvenirs?"
He held out a bag mutely. It was pounced on with ravenous glee by the regular inhabitants of the shop. "Doumeki's been kidnapped. Don't you care?"
"Do you, Watanuki-kun?"
"Well, of course I do," Watanuki explained matter-of-factly. "If I don't rescue him then something horrid will happen and it will have been all my fault and either he'll haunt me or I'll be stuck cooking for him for the rest of my life and some things are just too horrible to contemplate. Stupid Doumeki. He does this on purpose, you know."
Watanuki had a nightmare, a recurring one, which woke him sweating at night more than he cared to admit. There weren't any monsters in it, just him, and Doumeki, and a kitchen. In his nightmare, Watanuki created meal after meal, each a minor work of art, both exquisitely tasty and highly nutritious, and it all vanished into that ravening, ungrateful maw...
"But enough of such things." Yuuko waved a languid, long-nailed hand. "Where are my pictures?"
Watanuki thoughtfully weighed the bulky, antique camera in its case. "It took ages to get some of these," he said. "All that travelling, and the endless flights of stairs up to the temples. Waiting until the shadows were just right. Oh, and wasn't there a planetary conjunction over that temple that won't happen again for years and years and years? At least that's what you told me. Three times. It would be a shame if this camera was broken and the film exposed, wouldn't it?"
Yuuko rose up, drawing the shadows about her, and loomed over Watanuki as only a mistress of Time and All Other Dimensions could. "Are you threatening me?"
"... yes?"
She turned away. "Very good." She clapped her hands. "Maru. Moro. And get yourself a towl. Wherever they are. I can never find anything when you're gone, houseboy..." She wandered inside, muttering to herself.
Watanuki's shoulders relaxed and he shared a small, brave smile with Himawari-chan.
Doumeki
He was in a dark place, earthy-rich and strung with roots. His head hurt, and his arm in the cast was throbbing a slow rhythm.
A scritching sound, and a match flared. A small tanuki raccoon-dog was looking at him, lighting a glass-chimneyed lamp, while around them other tanuki chittered and stared.
"Watanuki Kimihiro-sama?"
"Hn?"
"Are you not the Glasses Wearing One? He of the Piebald Gaze? The Good Luck Cook?"
The followers intoned, "Blue and yellow. Like the sun in the sky."
Doumeki said nothing. If the little guys found out they'd bagged the wrong schoolboy, there wasn't anything to stop them going back for Watanuki but Yuuko-san's problematic mercies. He shifted the glasses perched on his nose and touched his right eye gingerly.
The tanuki in front set the lamp on the floor to wobble awkwardly and bowed deeply, setting three fingers of each paw to the dirt and knocking his head against it. "Would you, would you, Watanuki-sama, for these insignificant persons, would you not cook for us?"
Doumeki sat and thought.
"...I can make tea."
Watanuki
He exited the room he used at Yuuko's, still towelling his hair, and saw Himawari-chan and Maru and Moro set up by the paper screen (scrawled with crayon, dammit! You leave the house for one week and – but anyway) seperating the customer area from the rest of the house. Maru lounged on a battered couch, drooping languidly, and her sister squatted on an overstuffed cushion on the floor. Himawari-chan knelt a little back from them, with her hands on her knees, looking at them both wide-eyed.
"... so we're asking you now," said Moro, smirking. "No, no, we never steal. We wouldn't steal the boy." She giggled in a self-satisfied manner. "Your servant shall be returned in one piece when The Event has ended. We're good for the hirage fee." She drummed a brief tattoo on the cushion between her legs and Himawari winced.
On the couch, Maru raised one disdainful eyebrow. "For my dear Watanuki's services, I charge very high indeed."
Moro raised one blithe hand. "After we win, we will pay anything you ask."
Maru smiled, cruel, inscrutable, "Oh, you will. Pay." She waved one hand. "But this is tiresome. "Maru, Moro."
At that, the pair of little girls jumped up, trotted to Himawari, and each planted a kiss on one of her eyes, mwah, mwah. She giggled. Then her eyes opened wide with a strange pearly sheen over them. "Ohhhhh," she breathed, and hurried into the main room. Watanuki peeked after her.
In exactly the positions that the soulless girls had mimed out, Yuuko lounged on a gilt fainting couch and a small furry person squatted on a large pink cushion on the floor. His ears, like his nose, were very large, and from them protruded tawny bristles. He wore a stiff red jacket bedecked with gold braid, and GENERALISSIMO written on the back.
Himawari-chan knelt in front of him, bowing, and tugged one of the narrow white ribbons that pulled her torrents of hair back from her face. It fell with a sinister slither and she dropped it into the tanuki's paw. She fixed the little furry guy with a melting gaze and said, "Please pass this onto my friend. While I am sure that you are looking after him well I, I worry, and I want him to know that I am thinking of him." The tanuki froze wide-eyed, like an animal caught in headlights, stuttered, nodded, and fled, taking his cushion with him.
Watanuki's stomach sank down to the floor. Of course Himawari-chan loved Doumeki better, the cad.
Well, he'd worry about that later. However much Doumeki annoyed him with his quiet, and his appetite, and his luck with girls, and his infernal reliability, and his appetite, there was one part of Watanuki's recurring nightmare which he reckoned he could live with, the bit where Mr 'Excuse Me While I Throw Myself Into Mortal Peril (For You)' Doumeki survived. And that was that.
From the couch Yuuko said, "If you follow a recipe all the way through, you will always have tasty food at the end. But magic isn't cookery."
Himawari nodded, and rose from the floor. "Was this unwise?"
Yuuko shrugged. Then she said, "the Sight won't last, but consider your bill added to. I want cheesecake tomorrow."
Himawari froze, then lifted her sleeve to cover her mouth and giggled. She dropped her other white ribbon on the floor. Tilting her head like a bird, she caught Watanuki's eyes and said, "I worry about you too, Watanuki-kun. Please take care."
He loved the way she smelled. Today it was lemon and ginger with overtones of parsley, which was odd, but nice, and very refreshing in the fug of Yuuko's shop. He crossed the room in three long-legged strides and caught her hand. She froze, but forced a sunny smile. "You are a fool, Watanuki-kun."
He shrugged and smiled. "Take care, Himawari-chan." He walked her outside, to where two crescent moons adorned the posts of the gate.
There were two furry children standing just outside, a tiny fox boy in a stripy cotton kimono, and a little tanuki girl in a frilly dress with a ribbon.
"Please, Watanuki-san!" they said, clasping their hands together. "Please help us bring the light back to someone's benighted heart!"
Chapter Three (the last) in a couple of days. There will be cheerleaders.
