Unending Winter

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Chapter One: Seasons

It was spring when he left. Doumeki, that is. Left. If one could call it that.

There had been cherry blossoms. He missed Watanuki's birthday, and came a week late. Watanuki had been worried that something was wrong. And then he had come back, and that was when the blossoms had bloomed that year. He should have known. Like Doumeki would miss his birthday, which he hadn't done for seventy years, except for...

He stopped that thought. He did not go there.

Watanuki laughed hollowly. It was the farthest sound from joy.

He sifted the crumbling dirt of his summer garden and wondered why he should summon the energy to plant anything this year. The sun had baked the earth, and the earth had cracked and crusted under the heat to give up its water. But as dry as it looked, if it was watered regularly, it would become fruitful. Maru and Moro watched him with tense, still faces, waiting for his signal, clinging to each other palm to palm.

Watanuki stood and looked at the dipping noon sun. It felt like it had just been rising over the horizon a few moments ago.

He knew it hadn't.

The shadows lengthened.

"Let's go to bed," Watanuki muttered to the girls, and walked back into the wishing shop without doing anything.

They didn't argue, traipsing behind him, whispering behind their hands. If it was a language, he didn't know it. He didn't have even have the energy to listen closely enough to tell.

He planted, in the end, only because some of the natural wards would have failed if he hadn't. But the garden was sparse, and when autumn came, he let the garden wither, and let the harvest rot to nothing. He told himself the garden needed a fallow year.

The leaves on the trees shriveled and turned brown, flaking off the branches like dead, dried skin. What little rain there had been had encouraged the mold. Watanuki felt the chill of winter through the cotton of his yukata.

Under the leaves, the garden was dying.

Watanuki tried to bring himself to care. The wind blew harder, blasting his skin.

"Watanuki. Watanuki," said the little back pork bun at his feet, very worried. "Come in from the cold." The kuromanju Mokona bumped at his ankles, making him stumble forward, but he didn't otherwise move. "Watanuki. Watanuki! You'll get sick! Watanuki, listen!" Mokona hissed desperately. "Please!" It was her last resort. Mokona was usually too cheerfully rambunctious to bother being polite.

"Yes," he mumbled, and slowly went inside.

When he came back out, it was unmistakably winter. His breath misted in the air. The cold seemed to get into his lungs, and stay there. He began to cough.

Mokona whined at his ankles like an restless mosquito, bouncing up and down anxiously, running and jumping at him to make him move, even stumble, towards the right direction for just a little bit—

Instead, he sat down hard on the porch. Snow fell overhead. The yard was covered in glittering white snow. Spring would be long in coming.

Mokona leapt into his lap, and curled up there, trying to warm his hands, reduced to crooning and burbling, for there were no words that Watanuki would listen to. Only her feelings.

He fell into a trance, mesmerized by the sparkling whiteness. He thought about moving only when he realized, with a galvanizing jolt, that his feet were completely numb. He moved then, but slowly, achingly, like the old man that he supposed he was.

Maru and Moro tried locking the doors to the garden at night, but their efforts were ineffectual. When Watanuki sleep-walked, he would open the doors while they slept and wander out to the porch under the moon, still in his pajamas. In the morning they would find him there, cold to the touch, barely alive. The girls would drag him inside and stoke the fire and cover him in warm water bottles and blankets. And then they hid, crossing their fingers behind their backs as they waited.

Mokona was frantic. She could not predict Watanuki's behavior, nor could she understand it.

Watanuki was waiting for Doumeki. Waiting for the spring to come.

But though the snow melted, the clouds overhead—sometimes thick, sometimes thin—covered the sky in grey without relent. There was not a sign of the blue sky above, to the heavens.

The world outside seemed to forget about them. Before, Watanuki would have customers once a week, sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a week. For the last few years the number of customers had slowed to a trickle, just before Doumeki...left...but Watauki hadn't worried.

He didn't have energy to worry. Watanuki could not have safely dealt with them, anyway. The few he ran into he listened to for as long as he could stand, and then he fetched the item they needed from Yuuko's stores, looking regal but weary. None of them had needed more than that, and they hadn't come back, except for the one person with the insoluble wish whom Watanuki had turned away at the door before locking it.

Otherwise the world outside let him alone. And Watanuki fell completely to pieces.