Shamelessly written to 'Seasons of Love' from RENT. And yes, Doumeki in this universe has seen it. He's a more artsy type than his canon counterpart.
Review, please!
You were taken by surprised when the first leaves started to go orange on the streets you walked. Watanuki would play as usual underneath one tree, and you began to have to suppress the desire to pluck fallen leaves from his hair or his clothing. The weather was yet hot, but the trees promised that sooner rather than later this would cease to be so.
It had been a year.
This shook you far more than the summer's epiphany had. A whole year. Only a year. Looking back, you realised that the small changes – changes that had seemed so small at the time – had completely transformed the way you lived. A year ago, you dropped spare change in some man's flute case because he vaguely caught your eye. Now – you glanced at him and smiled slightly – now suddenly he had become the axis on which your world turned. And he had done so without intent, without desire, simply by existing. It seemed as it were inevitable that you and he meet, for nothing had happened by conscious thought.
It was, as Watanuki remarked about something else, "hitsuzen." He was actually talking about the change of the seasons and change in the passersby.
"I asked my boss about this elderly woman I see passing by," he commented. "She looked… I don't know. Sad, maybe. But beyond that. And Yuuko said, 'It isn't something you can affect.' I wasn't sure what she meant."
"Whatdid she mean?" you inquired.
He didn't have a prickly reply, which meant that he was actually thinking quite a bit. "She said, 'The events in her life arehitsuzen. Inevitable. Something directly influenced by what has happened before, and a course already set.' I asked if there was anything I could do…" He shrugged. "She said no. That as I am… I can't do a thing."
"As you are?" you asked, definitely curious and not in spite of yourself at all.
"The reason no one notices me," he said. "Surely you've no…ticed…" Then he stared at you as if realising something for the first time. "Wait – how do you notice?"
Realisation began to dawn. "Notice you?" you asked. "I have since last autumn." Although you never properly noticed him until that Christmas. But you didn't think that was quite what he meant, unless he had an ability to read minds you hadn't previously known about.
"No one else has," he muttered.
"Hitsuzen?" you offered, and he looked incredulous and surprised as if the possibility never would have occurred to him.
And really, you thought later, it did seem like something that would have happened based on the patterns of your lives, disregarding intentions entirely. You weren't sure what kept others from noticing Watanuki, but you were happy that you at least had reaped the benefits of being the only one. Someday, you vowed, you would meet this Yuuko and get the whole story.
It was a few days later that he remarked, "Today is exactly a year since you noticed."
"You remembered?" you inquire, rather impressed with his sudden display of memory.
"It was a momentous occasion," he sniffed, looking away. "That someone actually dropped coins in the flute case. It was the first time anyone besides Yuuko noticed me since people stopped."
It was a statement that begged a question, but he was vague with the reply to yours, retorting that obviously he wasn't born this way and he had once had a perfectly normal life, thank you very much. You weren't sure if he was keeping things to himself, or he simply didn't know what had happened to him.
But exactly a year was something special. You took him out to dinner that night and fondly ignored the protestations and demands to see the tab.
You had been too busy living that year to really realise how time passed, though you had definitely noted its passage. You'd counted by months, sometimes by days, but after a while things began to blur into moments and memories. Watanuki. He had made up your year, this year. It was like the song from RENT: "measure your life in love."
You thought it would be the best possible outcome if you could continue to count by memories, if Watanuki could continue to be the foundation of time's passage. He was stuck with you at this point, yes, but you would have liked to think that maybe, possibly, someday he would seek you out. And maybe, possibly, someday he would come to understand how much this mattered to you.
And maybe, possibly, hopefully – someday he would not only understand, but also reciprocate.
Autumn, you felt, was the season of beginnings. Another year of university – your last unless you chose to seek your master's degree – was due to begin. The first time you'd come to the City to live was a September four years ago. And of course, you'd met Watanuki exactly a year ago. That in itself was a milestone, a beginning of something you didn't think – at least, you hoped not – would end anytime soon.