A/N: The thing about sequels is you don't always see them coming. For those who may not have the original summary for this fic fresh in their minds, it reads, This is not the scene where supernatural forces coerce them into having sex. This is the argument they had afterwards, and it fitted chapter one perfectly well.

However, I may have ruined that now, because I've gone and written the 'what happened before' part anyway. And there's another part to go covering what happened afterwards too. I trust my readers will forgive me.

I'm keeping the summary though, because I like it.

Spoilers: For events from the manga, up to around chapter 95, or the end of volume 8.

Yuuko's latest client had been a nervous looking man who wrung his hands a lot as he told them about the strange reoccurring phenomenon that had taken place at his house since the last Halloween. In exchange for an antique heirloom necklace, Yuuko agreed to take care of the haunting spirit responsible. She instructed Watanuki to call in on Doumeki, and gave him an item shaped like an old fashioned lantern. Their task, she told him, would be to bring the spirit back to her inside it.

He should have known there'd have to be some kind of hidden complication. Even though they were still bound to get there to discover that the spirit was five times too large to fit into the strange device or there was no earthly way to tempt it in, Yuuko's instructions were never anywhere near that detailed.

Yuuko had assured the man his haunting problems would be taken care of by the end of the week and made sure he had somewhere else to stay until then, before sending Watanuki out to take care of it straight away. The meeting took forty minutes and two cups of tea, not counting an extra minute or two for Yuuko to give Watanuki his instructions afterwards. When he arrived at Doumeki's shrine, Watanuki managed to summarise most of it in one sentence.

"There's this thing haunting this guy's house and Yuuko wants us to take care of it so come on," he announced as soon as the door slid back, then spun on his heel and walked off.

"What would you have done if one of my parents had answered the door?" Doumeki wondered aloud, falling effortlessly into step behind him as if this was a daily occurrence.

"Like that's ever happened. Yuuko would probably tell me it's hitsuzen that you're always going to answer the door. And the lantern is for catching it in, so don't get any dumb ideas about me carrying it around just for fun." It was hard to stalk as fast as he wanted to while carrying it; the damn thing was seriously putting him off his stride.

"You should be more careful with that," Doumeki suggested, watching the lantern nearly complete a full loop-the-loop for the fourth time. He was probably right, which only made things worse.

"Shut up. It'll survive. If it can handle a spirit it can handle a few shakes." Watanuki shook it again just for emphasis, and tried to hide a wince as he felt one of the links in the handle stretch.

"Is it going to disappear if you don't hurry?"

"Is what?"

"The haunted house," Doumeki explained.

"What? Of course not!"

"Then why the rush?"

"You do not get to tell me how fast to walk!"

"Consider it a suggestion then," said Doumeki mildly. "Slow down."

What Watanuki wanted to say was that he didn't want Doumeki along at all, but facing a haunted house without backup was more horrifying than anything he was willing to deal with. Even spending the rest of the evening in Doumeki's company had to be infinitely preferable to that.

The house was of the traditional style that wouldn't have looked out of place next to Doumeki's shrine. The haunting might have been a recent feature, but it suited the place. Watanuki toed off his shoes, resisting the urge to knock, and stepped inside.

Doumeki watched all this intently. "You aren't coughing."

"There's no smoke or anything, why should I be?" Watanuki snapped, too irritated to care what Doumeki was getting at.

"You don't feel anything either?"

Watanuki considered, then shook his head. "Nothing so far."

"Then it's not something malicious," Doumeki concluded thoughtfully.

"Yuuko didn't say it was. But it's haunting the place, so it can't be friendly."

Doumeki frowned. "If you can't sense it, it could be hard to find."

Watanuki waved a hand vaguely. "I'll probably see it when it turns up. Come on, let's get this over with."

The house wasn't just old; it was also large. There had to be at least twenty rooms, a number of which would turn out to be little more than store rooms for a lot of old clutter. It may have had only one or two residents these days but it gave the impression it must have had at least a dozen not so long ago, all of whom had left without taking a single belonging with them, or even packing anything away. Watanuki found himself tidying rooms just by habit as he went through them.

A quick lap through the place turned up nothing remotely supernatural and not so much as an unexplained shiver from Watanuki. Yuuko's client had given very few specifics about where the offending spirit had been seen. The only way to be sure would be to look everywhere, to go through the house with a fine toothed comb – and if what they were looking for really would fit in the lantern, as Doumeki pointed out, then there was every reason to believe it could be something small enough to hide just about anywhere.

This could take a while.

After the first couple of rooms they sorted out a system. Since he probably wasn't going to be able to see what they were looking for even if it jumped right in front of his face, Doumeki stood in the doorway as a (hopeful) deterrent to any spirit that might try to get out, and helped out by pointing out places that hadn't been checked yet. Watanuki went through the hard work of searching in, under and behind everything the room contained, and complained loudly. Like most of Doumeki's ideas, it was entirely reasonable and as annoying as hell.

The trouble with Doumeki, he reflected somewhere around room number eight, was that even after so much association, getting angry at him every few minutes was still about the only way Watanuki knew to deal with him. It wasn't his fault the other boy could irritate Watanuki just by existing in the same space as him, especially since Doumeki rarely left it at doing just that. If he could just – oh, something. Give Watanuki some idea what was going on his head. Stop being right all the damn time. Stop being so damn smug about everything. Stop confusing the matter by going to such extreme lengths to save his life every other week and still being just about the only person Watanuki could actually talk to about all this stuff. Recognise that lunches did not emerge from Watanuki's kitchen by some magical process that did not involve actual work – and even if he was going to make them anyway that wasn't any excuse for taking them for granted. But like it or not, Doumeki Shizuka was becoming one of the more unpleasant facts of Watanuki's life, wedged somewhere between man-eating spirits, the employer from hell and a girl who never seemed to notice he was interested in her. It's damn hard being the scarily self-sufficient one with an over-developed sense of personal responsibility when someone else turns up, points out all the gaps where your self-sufficiency had fallen through, and starts filling them in.

"What sort of haunting was it?" Doumeki asked him after the first couple of rooms turned up nothing more supernatural than off-coloured wallpaper.

"Huh?" said Watanuki, who hadn't been paying attention.

"The owner of the house. How did he know it was haunted? It might give us a clue where to find that thing," he pointed out.

Watanuki tried to remember the details. There really hadn't been very many of them.

"Just – standard haunting stuff, I guess. Windows rattling, things being knocked over, lights flashing on and off. Oh, and people who slept here were having weird dreams."

"What kind of dreams?"

"He didn't say. Nightmares, probably." Watanuki knew all about spirit-induced nightmares. A lot of his didn't end when he woke up. "What good is that to us anyway? Because I am not going to go to sleep here and wait for that thing to show up."

As a rule, Doumeki's expressions did not change much, but there was a nuance to this one now that said: please remember you were the one that suggested that, not me. "It was just something a bit different."

For better or worse, no more was said on the subject.

It took eleven rooms of clutter before they got even their first hint that the haunting was genuine. This was more than long enough to ensure neither of them was alert enough to do anything about it. Watanuki turned over a teacup, which he'd fully expected to be as spiritless as the last eight identical cups in the set, and something small and white whizzed past his ear, spun in a full, dizzying loop around his head and zoomed away through the open door. He barely got more than the quickest of glances at it, just enough to make out a shape roughly humanoid despite its diminutive size. Either it had a long white tail or had been going fast enough to leave the impression of one in its wake.

Doumeki, useful as ever, stood right there as the spirit flew past him. He watched Watanuki with the usual bland face that he saved for his companion's Dance of the Spirit No-One Else Can See. "Was that it?"

"You didn't see anything?"

"Nothing."

Watanuki sighed. Of course it wasn't going to be one of those few spirits Doumeki could actually see; that would have made it far too easy.

"Where did it go?" Doumeki wanted to know.

"Back out. Around the corner, I think," Watanuki pointed.

Doumeki glanced over his shoulder. "That's back to all the rooms we just looked through."

Watanuki gritted his teeth and tried to convince himself that any job they could get this far through without something trying to eat them was an easy one. It didn't work nearly as well as he'd thought it would.

The second time they saw the spirit was only a moment later, as soon as they stepped out into the corridor again. It must have been waiting for them out there, and running into it again so soon startled Watanuki even worse than the first time. Doumeki made a grab for the tiny spirit as it whizzed past, but missed by a mile. He glared at his hand with what on anyone else would have been real human frustration.

"I saw it for a moment that time," he said by way of explanation, tapping a finger under the eye that had caused them both so much trouble. He'd been trying to aim for it using someone else's viewpoint, Watanuki realised with a mental wince on the other boy's behalf. That couldn't be easy – no wonder he'd missed.

"It went in there," Watanuki told him, pointing again, and led the way back to a cluttered lounge they'd searched only a few minutes ago.

"Oi," said Doumeki, sounding thoughtful as he followed Watanuki in. "You didn't see it go through any walls, did you?"

"No, just through the doorway. Why?"

Doumeki pulled the door shut behind him with a click. "Maybe we can trap it."

It sounded like a crazy way of trying to capture a spirit, but there was no harm in trying. Watanuki surveyed the room. It was one of many they'd looked through already, and had at least a dozen places for a tiny spirit to hide, none of which looked like they'd been disturbed since he'd last seen them. Watanuki gave another sigh and got to work.

"Damn that Yuuko," he grouched, checking under a pile of lacy cushions for the second time, "We need a net to catch this thing, not a glass box. It wouldn't hurt her to give us some kind of hint, would it?" There was only silence from Doumeki – presumably he was treating this as a rhetorical question. "What if we were wrong and it really can fly through things?" Watanuki went on. "We'll never catch it. Unless we're just supposed to hold the lantern up and hope it flies in…" Doumeki's silence was starting to get on his nerves. "I know you can find some way to help me out here! The door's closed, and you couldn't catch it even if it flew straight past you, so there's no point guarding anymore. Look around or something – maybe you can scare it out."

It occurred to Watanuki a few moments later that no matter how unhelpful he might usually be, this was the sort of statement which Doumeki would usually have responded to. The other boy had been silent for a little bit too long for comfort.

Watanuki turned around. A second later his mouth dropped open and one arm sprang up to point madly at the tennis-ball sized spirit that was hovering right over Doumeki's shoulder. It looked like it was in the act of whispering something in his ear – Doumeki had taken on the look of someone listening intently, like he was trying to make out a piece of music being played some distance away in another room.

"There! There! It's right there!" Watanuki hissed, hurrying forward, arm still outstretched and pointing urgently.

Only Doumeki didn't make another grab for the spirit. He didn't seem to hear Watanuki at all. Instead, he grabbed the hand that was being pointed at him by the wrist and yanked it sharply down, making its owner stumble awkwardly towards him. Doumeki must have done something with the other hand to steady them since the maneuver didn't end with them both colliding messily, but Watanuki didn't really notice what, because most of his brain was far too busy noticing that Doumeki had taken advantage of their new proximity to line his mouth up with Watanuki's and kiss him on the lips.

There's a lot that has been said on the subject of first kisses in other sources – the hoard of new sensations, the melting into each other's arms, the impression of fireworks going off in the background. There's supposed to be that wonderful moment when you both get past the initial awkwardness and finally start to figure out how it works, breathlessness and weakness at the knees, every nerve on alert and every sense heightened as never before.

Watanuki wasn't particularly aware of any of this. If there were any fireworks going off in his head, it was his brain exploding trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.

This part took a bit longer than it probably should have, between all that mad flailing and his brain going boom. The trouble was that Watanuki was just a bit too used to assuming that everything wrong with the universe was in some way Doumeki's fault, and it took a few seconds before it occurred to him that the fact there was a spirit-thing whispering something in Doumeki's ear and the fact that Doumeki was behaving in a manner weird even by his usual incomprehensible standards at the same time was probably not a coincidence.

Watanuki managed to put some method to his flailing long enough to back away a bit. "You…! Damn you, it's that thing, it's making you…"

But it was pretty obvious Doumeki wasn't listening – perhaps wasn't even capable of listening to anything Watanuki had to say right now. He tried again to point to the offending spirit, but Doumeki was still holding his wrist down, and as Watanuki backed away he followed him. Watanuki's knee-jerk reaction to this was to back away even further, which only stopped once he felt himself bump into something and realised Doumeki now had him pressed up against a wall and there was nowhere left to back away to.

Now, if Doumeki had done what Watanuki had expected at this point and gone back to trying to kiss him again, the situation would probably never have gotten much further. Watanuki would have kept flailing his free arm until he managed to do something like punch Doumeki in the eye, and no matter what the spirit tried, this very likely would have been enough to wreck the mood irreparably. But Doumeki didn't do that immediately – he hesitated; one thumb tracing lightly over Watanuki's cheek (oh, that's where that hand wound up), the other still holding his wrist. Watanuki could still see the spirit whispering in his ear, but it didn't seem as though Doumeki had attention to spare for anything other than the boy he had pinned up against the wall. And the look on his face stopped even Watanuki.

There was just so much longing there. Like Doumeki was looking at something he'd always wanted, but had somehow never even noticed until today, and had already accepted without question that it was something he was never going to have. Coming from Doumeki, master of deadpan, for whom one eyebrow spoke volumes, it was the kind of look you could drown in. Watanuki would never know how much of it was just the influence of whatever the spirit on the taller boy's shoulder was still whispering in his ear, but Watanuki managed to spare just enough thought to muse that if this was what was going on in Doumeki's head all the time, maybe it was a good thing he didn't usually know about it.

When Doumeki leaned in again at last, slowly, not breaking eye contact until the last second, Watanuki found he no longer had it in him to object. Now that he was actually paying attention, he couldn't help but notice Doumeki wasn't bad at this at all.

Within a few seconds, there were fireworks of a very different, much more pleasant variety going off in his head.

By the time Doumeki's hands started to sneak under his shirt, objecting was the farthest thing from Watanuki's mind.

Several minutes later, Doumeki noticed what was going on. It came as a bit of a surprise, not because he couldn't remember how he got there, but because up to that point there'd been a sort of haze over his mind which had made it difficult to remember certain things. Like why, to pick an example, it might have been considered unusual behaviour to make out with the partner who was supposed to be helping you exorcise a spirit. Or strip him out of most of his clothes. Or push him to the floor, climb on top of him and start cataloguing things that could be done with a hand or a mouth that would make him shiver underneath you. Not to put too fine a point on those or anything.

Spirits. Right. That might explain quite a bit. Although it was starting to look like today's mission was going down as a miserable failure in the exorcising department. With a slight reluctance that he'd probably avoid mentioning later, he made to get up, maybe explain to Watanuki that whatever-it-was was over and see what was still to be made of the situation.

Doumeki had not to this point been immediately aware that Watanuki had arms wrapped around behind his back and head, but he was reminded of them quite sharply when, after letting him get barely fifteen centimetres away, Watanuki tightened them both and pulled him straight back down again.

Okay, thought Doumeki, nibbling distractedly on the ear his mouth was now pressed against, since this seemed to be the expected response, and besides, he was really quite enjoying hearing Watanuki make that noise (and just how much he liked that might be another of those things he'd avoid mentioning later). So there wasn't a unanimous vote on that one. Fortunately, while Doumeki may not have been able to exorcise spirits at twenty paces or resist hypnotic suggestion, he did have an ability to take bizarre situations in his stride that bordered on a superpower. So Doumeki did something that few other people in his position would ever have been able to do – he thought about the situation rationally.

He had very few delusions that Watanuki's unusually enthusiastic attitude to what was going on here would last long after it was over. If he let this continue to its conclusion, some things were inevitable – Doumeki would eventually have to deal with a certain amount of personal embarrassment, and what was going to be a seriously pissed off Watanuki.

On the other hand, if he made the effort to stop this now, he'd still have to deal with an only slightly lesser amount of personal embarrassment, an only slightly less pissed off Watanuki, and also an erection.

Put like that – and he had to admit it was possible he wasn't in a state to be entirely rational about all this, but what could you do? – it didn't seem like much of a decision.
They'd gotten this far. It would be impolite to stop now, he reasoned. Continuing seemed like the only good idea.

The status of that decision as a good idea only improved as the minutes passed, far faster than they had any sort of right to.

The journey from the pleasant fuzz of the afterglow back to reality took Watanuki about ten minutes and, compared to the ten minutes before that, was not any sort of fun at all. He had known objectively this would be coming, or had no good excuse for not knowing, but in that distracting world of hands and mouths and heat and skin, this part had all seemed comfortably far away.

The reality of the situation was a lot less pleasant, and had left him lying on the floor of a stranger's house next to Doumeki, in very few clothes and quite distressing need of a towel. The part that really clinched the back-to-reality journey, however, was that Doumeki was sitting up now, and was looking at him again.

It wasn't the same look that had started everything – thank god, because that would have been more than Watanuki could take. This was more guarded and more curious – a look of someone who wasn't sure whether to be worried about what was going to happen next and was delegating the decision over whether there'd be a freakout to someone else, but a lot of the openness from before was still there. In a situation like this, even Doumeki could only close down so fast.

It was starting to dawn on Watanuki that no matter how much he might want to deny the fact he'd just had sex with Doumeki, what they'd done was more than close enough for a number of wider definitions of the term (and in any case Watanuki was not prepared to think hard enough about anything that had just happened to contemplate that sort of classification in any more detail than that). This wasn't like being rescued by him or hearing he'd stood ten hours in the rain for you or realising, late at night, that you really wanted to talk to him. It wasn't like being dragged to one of his archery tournaments and spending the whole thing hoping and expecting him to lose miserably, only to feel this odd sense of warm pride when you saw him take first place - or even catching yourself admitting, occasionally, that from the right side, you could maybe see why there were all those girls after him. The difference was that you could deny all of those meant anything. You could deny most of them happened at all.

It was also then that Watanuki first became aware that, by dint of being the only one who hadn't been mind whammied in the past hour, it was going to be up to him to explain what had been going on.

"It was that spirit!" Watanuki blurted, suddenly discovering that it was very important that the record be set straight on this matter as quickly as possible. "It was whispering something to you. To make you do -- all that stuff! "

It had to say a lot about either the sort of jobs Yuuko had had them doing lately or Doumeki's general talent for nonchalance (and possibly both) that he looked as though he'd expected something like that. "Something like hypnotic suggestion then?"

"I don't know!" Having Doumeki back to his usual self was both terrifying and an enormous relief. "Do you even remember anything that happened?"

"Most of it." Doumeki stared at the other boy contemplatively. "Did it do the same to you?"

"Why would it…" was as far as Watanuki got before catching on to what Doumeki was thinking. He'd been there too – and he'd let all of that happen. Any reasonable person would have to assume he'd been under the same influence. "It probably couldn't whisper to both of us at once! It already had you doing everything it wanted – it didn't need to do anything to me!" he insisted, remembering too late that offering this many excuses only made his cause all the more suspicious. He'd just hit a new stage in the process of this realisation he'd been going through that the only one who'd had any chance of playing designated-driver through all of this had been him, and this was doing serious damage to his mental placement of himself in the role of the victim here.

Doumeki glanced around the room, as though the ability to see spirits was something he might have contracted through unusual proximity. "It isn't here anymore, right?"

The change in subject was a seriously welcome relief. "It's gone. And we are going too. Before it comes back." He mentally dared Doumeki to point out their failure at catching it. There was no way he was going anywhere that spirit might turn up again today. "Where are my clothes?" he complained to the universe in general.

"Next to you. They haven't gone far." There was a very slight uncomfortable edge to Doumeki's voice, but it was already so close to being back to his usual deadpan that it proved Watanuki's next breaking point.

"Is it too much to ask you to even have a reaction?" Watanuki snapped before he could stop himself. "I mean we just – it made us…" He gestured state they both were in, unable to make himself actually say any of the appropriate words, and did his level best to keep his eyes from wandering anywhere south of Doumeki's shoulders. "And any normal human being would be… would be bothered or something! Not that I mean to imply you are either normal or human, but you could at least make the effort to pretend once in a while!"

"A reaction?"

"An emotional response! I know you've heard of them. Be embarrassed! Sorry! Even smug would do, and I know you can do that one! Anything!"

In attempt to distract himself before he said anything else, Watanuki went back to the task of locating those all-important clothes. Doumeki had been right, they hadn't gone far, but now that he had them in sight, the actual process of putting them on posed more problems than he'd first appreciated. Putting on his pants right in front of Doumeki would be nearly as bad as taking them off. Putting on a shirt would leave him wearing a shirt and no pants, the image of which felt even worse. In any case he really (ogod) needed to clean himself up a bit before he got dressed properly, but that would mean walking around naked to find something he could use. He could yell at Doumeki to turn around until he was done, but saying that to someone who had already had plenty of time to get used to the sight of him in this state was more ridiculous than even Watanuki was prepared to deal with.

Eventually, he grabbed a shirt and wrestled it over his head, just in time to hear Doumeki reply, "Are you alright?" his voice slightly muffled through the fabric.

This was not a reference to the smaller boy's implied sanity based on his last outburst, Watanuki realised, this was Doumeki's idea of having a reaction, and his first reaction was to be worried about someone else.

Watanuki got stuck between "Of course I'm alright!" and "Of course I'm not alright!" and settled on "Why wouldn't I be alright?"

"I told you, I don't remember everything clearly," said Doumeki patiently.

He sounded honest enough that Watanuki had to give him an honest answer in reply. "You didn't do anything that hurt me or anything, alright?" he said, then gave in to earlier impulse and added, "Now turn around so I can finish getting dressed without you staring at me."

Doumeki raised an eyebrow at him, but turned around without further complaint.

It took another fifteen minutes before they got out of there. The room had been one of the less tidy ones when they first came in, but by the time Watanuki was done, neurotically cleaning up everything he could find, the result was, if anything, now suspiciously neat.