A/N: While I did everything in my power to make this chapter as clear and painless as possible, difficulties may remain. If you manage to follow the dialogue without any problems, you have my salute.

Please enjoy.

P.S. Sorry for this being a little late. I may be late for the next chapter because of a little writer's block... I've never been so stuck on smut before;;;

Fractured

Watanuki could feel the firm rhythm of Doumeki's breaths against his burning cheek. He could hear the rapid heartbeats confessing the endearing emotion that the calm hold of the priest's arms belied.

"But this can't be real," Watanuki protested aloud, slightly muffled by the rough bandages swathing the taller youth's torso, "or it doesn't make sense."

Doumeki took a deep breath, holding it for a few moments before releasing it slowly. "I was reborn, like you. I wanted to come back. I'm guessing you retained your memories as well?"

Watanuki hesitated, his hands clutching Doumeki's shoulders from behind. "I had dreams… they told me those dreams were visions of a past life…"

"They?" Doumeki queried interestedly.

"The people who brought me up. Not my parents, I never knew them. They were three senior Onmyouji practitioners and a young clairvoyant Miko." Watanuki explained in a quiet voice, his violet eyes growing dark. He had left out someone, but he had too much to deal with now to bring up his rogue guardian spirit.

"I retained mine." Doumeki informed the young Onmyouji, his golden eyes lowered to the messy dark hair of the head nestled so vulnerably against his chest.

"Then why did you pretend not to know me from before, from our past life?" Watanuki countered unhappily, though he did not relinquish his perch.

"I didn't. It's complicated." Doumeki replied, a tinge of regret in his usual heavy monotone.

"This… isn't a dream is it?" Watanuki whispered, hating how brittle he sounded, but desperately needing to ask.

Doumeki drew back a little, lifting Watanuki's chin so that their eyes met across the tamely lit darkness. "I'll explain anything you want, but this isn't a dream."

Violet eyes swam with a brimming brightness as they beheld the solemn light in golden ones. "Shizuka-dono?" Watanuki asked in a bare whisper, challenging the fates to spring their cruel trap.

"Shizuka-" Doumeki softly insisted, "since when does a man have to be so reserved with what is rightfully his?"

"When have I ever given cause to be accused of being reserved with you?" Watanuki retorted with a weak smile bordered in tear tracks. Yet in the next moment, he shook his head and pulled away from Doumeki, retreating to the empty bed still rumpled with the signs of the priest's stay. He didn't turn as he felt Doumeki's presence beside him.

"What's wrong?" Doumeki wanted to know, hovering by the Onmyouji but restraining himself from bridging the distance, even with a simple touch.

"This isn't real. Those events… those dreams… I don't know what they are, but even if they were visions of the past… how is it possible that two people who died so many years ago, came back exactly as they were then?" Watanuki argued, warping a tented line in the sheets with a white-knuckled grip.

"You came back." Doumeki pointed out.

Watanuki's head snapped up, turning to the impassively watching priest with a frustrated glare.

"Alone," he began, voice trembling, "alone it was fine. A hallucination on my own part, a vision of the past where of course I'd see myself as how I am now, but, but, with you here, with you telling me you remember everything-"

"It confirms everything?" Doumeki finished, unnervingly sedate, though his eyes seemed to penetrate Watanuki's thoughts. "Or prophesizes what is to come?"

Watanuki watched the priest wordlessly for a few moments before sinking into his cupped hands.

"I made you sacrifice all those people… all that… real?" Watanuki asked indistinctly through his hands.

Sighing, Doumeki sat beside the hiding youth, his hand reaching out but hesitating to clasp the Onmyouji's shoulder. "Whatever you imagined you did, you've spent centuries repenting for it."

Watanuki raised his head and turned to Doumeki again, noticing the outstretched hand and taking it into his own before he could stop himself. When those fingers tightened firmly against his, he rested their sealed hands on his lap, his gaze searching the Shinto priest's unreadable golden eyes.

"Centuries?" He repeated in question, noting the reluctant tilt of the Shinto priest's head.

"In the limbo our souls were trapped in… you stopped a powerful demon from reviving." Doumeki began vaguely, his gilded gaze sliding away from Watanuki's. "Had that demon revived as it was, countless of lives would have been lost."

"Doumeki…?" Watanuki urged when the Shinto priest lapsed into silence and stared blankly at the shadowed ceiling.

"I don't know much. Parts of my memory have been suppressed." He answered vaguely, but pre-empted Watanuki's pursuing question. "It's better if we start from the beginning, even though… we don't have much time, there's no point in not making much sense."

"Don't have much time?" Watanuki squeezed Doumeki's hand instinctively, drawing a rare, uncomplicated smile from the Shinto priest.

"Missing me already?" Doumeki teased as his smile narrowed into a smirk.

"You know, I'm beginning to realize that with or without your memories, you're still a colossal jerk." Watanuki noted coldly, though he couldn't bring himself to release his grip.

"With or without my memories, I'm still Doumeki." The priest affirmed, eyes suddenly focused and sober upon Watanuki's slow frown. "Do you remember how you died?"

"You were trying to save me." Watanuki evaded with deliberate offhandedness.

"I killed you." Doumeki corrected brutally. "I stole your soul and you died from it."

"What of it?" Watanuki dismissed, violet eyes veiled beneath briefly lowered lids, before emerging dark with tight emotion. "About the only thing I'm actually mad about is that my last thoughts were of how you were going to be torn to pieces because of me."

"That might not have been what happened," Doumeki whispered, his gaze falling away from widened violet eyes, "I don't think that's what happened. It isn't likely."

"What're you saying?" Watanuki mumbled in confusion.

"I have to start from the beginning." Doumeki reiterated, stressing the words in a leaden tone.

"Because we don't have much time." Watanuki repeated the priest's earlier warning with a helpless smile, but he nodded in understanding. "Ok. I'm listening."

For a moment, Doumeki watched the melancholic acceptance with a pained frown, but he tightened his grip on their joined hands and resumed his explanation.

"Murder, forgiven or otherwise, is a heinous crime, bearing a terrible price. When I killed you, I hurt more than just my conscience. I believe that I damaged my very existence, and my very humanity."

"Stop saying that you killed me!" Watanuki interjected angrily. "I don't know what happened to you, but conjectures made on a false premise-"

Doumeki stopped Watanuki by brushing the Onmyouji's flushed cheek. "It brings me no pleasure in admitting the fact, nor do I do it to torture myself. My body, my soul, the very essence of who I was and the potential of my deeds were lined in cracks, made fragile in the face of my crime. A weakness for the demons to exploit.

"Back then, my plan wasn't just to absorb your soul only to have the demons take you after they unravelled mine. The spell I used bound our souls together, forcing their fates to be intertwined. If my soul was lost, so would yours, and if your soul was consumed, so was mine.

"When the demons arrived, they easily subdued what defence I could put up, and they captured me. There was the usual infighting, with casualties serving to enrich the victors until a black serpent, silver lynx, and a snow monkey tripartite alliance of demons, engorged with their former comrades, decided to sink their teeth into your soul.

"It was then that they realized that they couldn't, not without destroying themselves. There is… special significance to one's ability to procreate, and the power to evoke life drains one's spiritual essence and purity. Conversely, a body that has not drawn upon its procreative ability, possesses certain qualities that grant it, and the contained soul, protection."

Watanuki blinked at Doumeki's impassive appraisal as the Shinto priest paused to check if the Onmyouji still followed the recounting.

"Are you saying that- because you were-" Watanuki prompted uncertainly.

"Virgin. A seal was drawn upon me when I was five, as with all boys in my family. So long as I maintained my sexual purity, it would hold, and amongst other things, any demon touching my soul would be incinerated." Doumeki unabashedly explained, though he noticed the faint blush that was colouring Watanuki's cheeks. "Why? I did tell you back then that I had never lain with a woman- or a man, for that matter. I believe you had asked because of some rumours that I was spotted in the forest in the midst of a tryst with an enchanting stranger who carried a baby in her arms. It turned out to be a vengeful spirit I was trying to peacefully exorcise."

"I don't remember that." Watanuki admitted. Trying to hide his embarrassment, he smirked with an affectionate viciousness. "So you died a virgin, huh?"

The laughter in Watanuki's eyes was abruptly extinguished by the anguished light in Doumeki's, which was followed by a sharp breath the Shinto priest took as he readied his answer.

"I don't truly know the circumstances of my passing, not as the Doumeki I am now anyway. I remember being drugged, seduced, tortured, all in a timeless cave deep in the heart of some mountain. How many months and years I spent clinging on to your soul for solace I will never know, but the only thing I remember next was regaining conscious in an astral limbo, my soul wrapped in yours." Doumeki finished, a faint strain in his voice.

"Unimaginable suffering…" Watanuki whispered, a pang crushing the breath in his lungs as he tried to picture the glossed over horror. Doumeki shook his head slowly and continued.

"When I awoke in limbo, it wasn't from a deep unconscious sleep. They were fading, but the sharp, twisting auras of hatred, fear and desire were still pulsing vividly in my consciousness."

"It's not hard to understand why-" Watanuki consoled but Doumeki shook his head again.

"Those emotions were very dark and intense, much more powerful than any human could hope to contain." Doumeki's haunted gaze swept over Watanuki's uncomprehending expression and wrenched away. "They were at a demonic level."

Watanuki opened and shut his mouth abortively, but finally persisted with an attempt at reasoning the information. "Are you saying the demons possessed you?"

"It is possible… but unlikely… when I awoke there was no sign of another presence aside from yours, demonic or otherwise." Doumeki released a long breath with an effort that seemed to weigh his shoulders down. "A demon able to freely possess my soul would not have hesitated to devour your soul and mine, and then escape the astral prison, but our souls were both intact… though yours… yours… something had savaged yours. Your lines of energy and resonance were broken and twisted. Only your mysterious power held you together. It took… a long time… for you to reform… and even then, you did not regain full sentience."

"You're saying that you did that to me." Watanuki quietly concluded for him.

"There's strong evidence that suggests that." Doumeki agreed, but he watched in amazement as Watanuki toppled gently over his lap, their clasped hands pressed close against the thin fabric of Watanuki's warmed cotton singlet. Doumeki rested his free hand over the silken strands of the Onmyouji's drying ribbons of dark hair, but his puzzlement hung unspoken between them.

"When you found me, unconscious by the roadside shrine, and took me in, I can still remember how secretly happy I was deep inside, despite how much of a fight I put up about wanting to leave." Watanuki began in a soft murmur, his lids fluttering shut as Doumeki stroked his head. "One time, some of your relatives played a trick on me and trapped me in a spatial loop whilst I was looking for some herbs in the eastern woods. I was so panicked that I didn't notice the magic at first. I kept crashing about, collecting scratches and bruises, until I calmed down enough to try sensing for you, and found something blocking my way.

"It was a barrier, of sacred making. My first reaction was that you had finally decided to rid yourself of me-"

"Your first reaction was to smash that barrier and scream for me to get my cowardly ass down to face you properly. You terrified my cousins who gave the game away fairly quickly and clumsily." Doumeki amended with a nostalgic grin.

"But we duelled anyway. I would have won if not for your cheating." Watanuki grumbled, a small smile spreading along his lips nevertheless.

"I had nothing to do with the rice cake you slipped on." Doumeki refuted mildly. "I didn't press the advantage in any case, and that match was inconclusive."

"Except the whole village was cheering your underhand victory." Watanuki pointed out with bad grace.

"I believe they were congratulating me on 'quelling the princess' tantrum' when I carried your dizzy form back home. Apparently, my cousins had been caught skulking around the forest by some woodsmen, and the villagers were quick to put two and two together. My cousins were given a little smack on the wrist for that stunt, sent to perform purifying rituals for all the wells, ponds and lakes in our lord's realm."

"That was a crazy village… but they were good people." Watanuki admitted fondly. "So my dreams are true, and they really died that way, ripped to shreds by their own possessed kin."

"Watanuki…"

"I cried a lot that day. I tried to hide it, because I was too ashamed to be seen with such crocodile tears. I had known that that would have been the ultimate end. I suppose, you felt that way too- that you were responsible." Watanuki glanced at Doumeki, watching the golden eyes peer over him with a patient sorrow.

"They were my responsibility." He answered simply.

"But you didn't shed a tear. Even when your cousins screamed to be saved, cut down before our very eyes, you didn't cry, not even in rage. At the time, I thought you had fallen into a silent despair, but having thought about it for over a decade in this second life, I finally realized that it wasn't simply that. The difference between us was that I could cry because I wished to blame myself, and you couldn't because you had already accepted the burden of all the sin for yourself. My conscience still needed to point out to me that I was to blame; you already knew that each bloody blow was by your hand, of your doing. It frightens me to think that you've held that belief to be true all this while."

Watanuki released their clasped hands and rolled his body up against Doumeki's bare arm, his lips perched timidly in a kiss across the dull gleam of the young man's shoulder. With a soft, brief hum of contentment, he draped an arm comfortingly across the sinewy back to the priest's other, smooth shoulder.

"There's something else you have to know-" Doumeki began, his violet eyes caressing Watanuki's upturned glance with a hushed light.

"Say it. You won't be satisfied until you do." Watanuki softly acceded, resting his cheek against the reassuring strength corded beneath the surface of the smooth shoulder.

"I can't remember how I died, how our souls got to that astral limbo, or what happened while we were in there before I awoke to find your savaged soul, and yet, I told you that Doumeki retained all his memory of our past life."

"Those were traumatic events- I don't even remember that astral limbo you keep mentioning." Watanuki answered, his breaths tickling across the slope of the Shinto priest's collarbone. Doumeki was not satisfied with the offered explanation.

"I don't remember much of my rebirth," he went on, "but the priests who cared for the orphan that I was, never told me much, except that my mother died in the difficult labour, and that my father was missing. I always had the impression that they were hiding something. The truth came to light when I was eleven years of age and started to have dreams, dreams of our past."

"I had them much younger." Watanuki noted with some surprise and Doumeki quietly nodded.

"There's a reason for that and I'll get to it in a moment. The dreams I had confused me at first, since I had no recollection of what they were, but they were so vivid I couldn't ignore them. I was obsessed with what they meant, and one day, I snuck out into the forests ringing the mountain temple I lived in. I knew, from their secretive behaviour over my past, that the priests who cared for me would not be supportive of what I was about to do."

Watanuki grinned as he imagined a young Doumeki dodging low branches and undergrowth while sneaking conspiratorial backward glances to the recently clambered wall of an ancient temple. Doumeki continued his story, unaware of the Onmyouji's secret fun.

"There was a divination spell to force visions of one's past life that I had found in the old scripture room. It wasn't a very large jump to hypothesize that my dreams were of a life once lived, and I aimed to verify it once and for all. The spell called for a natural body of 'living' water, water that had a replenishing source and that was active in its cycle with nature. There was a mountain lake that I was allowed to swim in occasionally in summer, a natural choice for the spell.

"The preparations went smoothly. I asked for the blessings of the gods of air, water and the mountain, calling upon my own patron deity as my consciousness streamed with my sacred power, delving deep into the hidden link within me into the Akasha to review the story of my past life- or tried to.

"It was as if I had been hurled into the midst of two titanic forces, each burning into the other, bleeding into the other. It's like two sides of a coin, each wanting to face the heavens, but each only able to do so at the expense of the other, so they end up spinning madly against each other- I'm… not sure if you'd understand…" Doumeki finished doubtfully.

Watanuki nodded wordlessly over Doumeki's shoulder. Spiritual experiences were difficult to explain in words that were designed to deal with regular phenomena.

"Just like the flip of a coin, it was pure fortuitous chance that my spiritual self collided into what, for want of a better description, I'll call my lucid half, one face of the coin. What I became from that encounter, well, you behold the result right now." Doumeki paused to meet Watanuki's silently assessing gaze, returning it with an expectant one. "It was like something had clicked into place. I knew everything… or nearly everything… my death… that period before my lucid self awoke in limbo… the knowledge of those particular events are perhaps stored in that other face of the coin, which was close by and yet completely locked away. I tried to reach for it, but- It was as if I stood on the door that that had closed on it, and was trying to force the door open by pulling on a chain attached to the handle. It seemed impossible. At the time, that didn't bother me too much. I was still revelling in the discovery I has made."

"But the discovery didn't stay- when we met you didn't recognize me." Watanuki pointed out. Doumeki nodded, dark brows furrowed above lidded eyes.

"That's because our ending was quite… something. An eleven-year-old boy looked through the eyes of a man who went through… those events. At that time, the eleven-year-old boy only wanted to escape. I can't really say how it happened, even though I have all of 'Buffer Doumeki's' memories, but when he next awoke, he- I was surrounded by my chagrined but relieved caretakers, with no memory of what I had seen in the memory visions, or of my lucid self." Doumeki quietly confessed.

Watanuki struggled to digest all the revelations for a while, but his curiosity eventually urged his hesitant question.

"Buffer… Doumeki?"

Doumeki grinned, a hint of bitterness in his self-mocking smile. "A term I coined, in the same way I called myself Lucid Doumeki. Buffer Doumeki is Doumeki without any recollection or influence from the past, created as a result of the two opposing identities grappling ceaselessly from within Doumeki's soul. Since the two identities, lucid and… the other…, are mutually exclusive, the natural order must have evolved a false, buffer identity to cope with the paradox. Well… all of this is conjecture, based on the limited knowledge open to me. I don't really know." He admitted with another flash of that crooked grin.

Watanuki gave a short hollow chuckle, rocking his head dolefully as he stared into the shadowed ceiling. "And I was taking you seriously for a moment. Just like you to sound so confident over nothing." He jibed with an empty smile.

"Watanuki-"

"Well then, Doumeki-sensei, I have a question. I understand why eleven-year-old Doumeki would find it hard to live with those memories, but how did a false buffer identity eject a real identity that had reasserted itself?"

Doumeki turned his face away, a deep swelling breath ebbing out of his frame like the rush of an icy midnight tide. "I chose to let go. I knew that the balance had been upset, between my lucid self and the other. By joining with the false buffer, I left the other identity unchecked, and all the signs warned me that that other was a dangerous, even demonic, identity that had to be locked away, and only my lucid self could be trusted to manage that, as it already had before."

"So you're going to let go again." Watanuki accused, all pretence of undaunted wit crumbling with his heated tone.

"I have to." Doumeki declared unequivocally, though he couldn't face the Onmyouji, even as Watanuki drew away from him. Yet, golden eyes darted urgently towards the slender youth's back when he felt Watanuki's presence shifting off the bed.

"Where are you-" He instinctively demanded, but Watanuki rapped back without letting him finish.

"What's it to you? You come when you want and leave when you please, but I have to wait patiently by your side?" The Onmyouji snapped, his back turned resolutely before the Shinto priest, though Doumeki could see the shaded profile of Watanuki's face.

"I can't come out just because I want to! I could come because…" Doumeki paused mid-retort, his steeply arched brows relaxing above lowering lids.

"Because what?" Watanuki asked in a quiet, ominous tone.

"Because you called for me." Doumeki replied wanly, unveiling eyes that glowed with a tired light. "With your tears; in your touch. Watanuki-"

"What?" The Onmyouji demanded again, his voice thick with poorly restrained emotion.

Golden eyes hardened in the amber-tinted darkness.

"I came to make you mine."

TBC