The Missing Eyes Ch.3
Disclaimers- I forgot last chapter and I'm likely to forget again. Not mine, not yours. This is my compliment to the writers of xxxHOLiC...

Language notes:
--Hiragana is the basic way of writing any form of Japanese with no inherent meanings in each character. Katakana is a modified version of hiragana, made to accomodate foreign words entering Japanese, like "garden heights apartment" which I'm sure exists somewhere.
--I debated on the mention of Icarus but I couldn't put in US-movie references that Watanuki wouldn't know, and I have figured out the basis of... five anime in my life. I figured Watanuki had to have read some Greek myths in school, and students very often think in the language of whatever they've read last.

Watanuki drank the water, glad that Doumeki had been exaggerating in his comment that all the ice had melted. It wasn't as if he wanted Tokyo flooded. He crumpled the flimsy paper cup and tossed it to its doom (the trashcan) before walking out of the shop and colliding with a telephone pole. A telephone pole that was not Amai Shuichi. This time.

"Are you going to tell me why you were wasting time in there?"

Watanuki glared at Doumeki.

"It's only 8:30; much of the time wasted was spent on the train." Watanuki thought for a moment. "Not that I would take up that creepy lady on her offer."

"What lady are you muttering about?"

"She called herself Kushinada. Supposedly guarded this snake called Orochi."

"The one that ate virgins?"

"Why do you of all people know those things?"

Watanuki stared at Doumeki incredulously. His reply about some grandmother or other was dissatisfying, so he decided to ignore it and stalked forward until he found a squat looking modern apartment building. Garden Heights was written in hiragana, an odd affectation of the rich recently. Not that he would know about those things, and not that the apartment was necessarily the residence of the rich, but the rich wannabes of Tokyo that had invested in buildings during the economic bubble of the late eighties were always like this. One impracticality after another with only enough of a break to toast sake. Peace had dulled their heads after this many years of mediocrity, although the alternative was just as bad.

"Here?"

Doumeki stared at the building doubtfully.

"Do you see anything?"

"I don't think I'm supposed to."

Watanuki walked up the well-lit steps to the entrance, and then realized that he didn't have the key to the entrance of the apartment. Visiting hours were until 6PM if he was to believe the sign on the door, and the entrance to the apartment itself got locked past visiting hours. He tugged at the door for good measure and was only half-surprised when the door melted open in his hands, offering too little resistance for a contraption of heavy glass and steel, even if it were onlyaccidentally unlocked. He sighed. All that meant was the he was probably meant to get in the apartment.

Mokona finally poked his head out of the extremely well-cushioned bag where he was napping.

"Are we there yet? I want to eat an okonomiyaki. Hurry up, April-Fools-Watanuki!"

"You just had dinner. You're forgetting that you came to offer assistance. Do you think I should, I don't know, take that Kushinada woman's advice and use this ring? How do I go about using it?"

"You just transfer the ring onto your left ring finger. It's the medicine finger and the finger you tie your spouse to. This ring was designed to untie you from any magic Kushinada could cast on you by reworking the internal structure of the bindings people place on one another. And I'm still hungry."

Mokona was always full of arcane encyclopedic knowledge that seemed to serve no purpose but to irritate. That Ichihara Yuuko-sann. Worst of all, Mokona never volunteered the information. Unless Watanuki were to ask a question every step he took, Mokona would never divulge helpful information prior to anything but a life-threatening blade hanging on his head. Watanuki had an internal bet that Mokona would have, given the choice, informed Icarus fifteen seconds before the wings were completely shot that his wings were going to melt out of over-ambitious flying, then advised him that his only chance at life lay in catching a flight with the nearest bird. Icarus would have plummeted to his death knowing that he missed his chance at life and that Mokona was an unhelpful bastard.

Or something. Mokona wasn't evil, just embarrassing to explain the presence of. What other self-respecting male high-school student carried a stuffed toy that was alive?

Doumeki was standing ahead looking at a sign on a door 118. This was the second door they'd crossed; the other was a door 141. Apparently room numbers didn't follow any special sequence. The nameplate read: Sakurai. Right room, then. Watanuki was about to re-check his scroll when he heard Doumeki rap on the door.

"Sakurai-sann?" Watanuki knocked again for good measure before an inelegant thudding and clanging of pots and pans echoed in the background.

"Oi, Watanuki, there's a ton of spiritual strength wandering around this apartment. I thought you should know," Mokona said cheerfully. Watanuki couldn't see a thing, of course. One day he was going to find a person that didn't put any ridiculous taika on information that didn't cost anything to give freely and ask about what exactly his eyes did and why he was involved with an alcoholic dimensional witch.

The door opened to the heavens collapsing on a small boy. Or so it seemed until Watanuki inferred from the boy's sharp sob and the sound of painted wooden beads clattering on the entrance's bare floor that the boy had fallen and gotten caught in a noren of beads. A grumbling woman came out within seconds, wiping her hands on her apron and pulling the boy up with a reprimand. Watanuki bowed politely.

"I'm sorry to disturb you at a busy time. Is your boy all right?"

The woman laughed.

"Boy? You came here for a boy? Then a boy you may have, but judging from that scroll you're wrinkling in your grubby hands, you got sent here for a little something else. Why don't you step away from this doorway before you and your henchman get squirrels stuffed down your larynxes?" the woman suggested. She spoke with the same thick accent as Shuichi had at our shop.It was a wonder how Shuichi had kept the accent living away from home so long. Nobody could have understood him in the other prefectures.

Then Mokona reared his head.

"Sakurai Shibana, it is a pleasure to meet you as a representative of Ichihara Yuuko-sann." Watanuki was surprised. That was the first sign of genuine politeness Mokona had ever shown anyone. Then again, Mokona had never greeted a minor goddess in front of him before either. "If Watanuki beats you up and leaves you with a rodent stuffed down your throat, I suppose you could take it as an insult from the witch herself. She sent you her errand boy because she thought he could deal with you." Watanuki changed his mind. He stuffed Mokona back in the shoulder bag and began to stutter apologies.

"I don't mean to, I mean, I wouldn't presume that," he began when the woman smiled and stepped back with the boy staring at us from the safety of her arms. She drew into her house across the wooden curtains that had gone up without Watanuki's noticing, and so Watanuki and Doumeki followed silently.

"You're apparently more interesting than I thought," the woman told them neutrally. "I don't like the looks of you very much," she told Doumeki, "and if Ichihara sent you, you must be the rumor wonder-boy that attracts spirits like carnage attracts flies and vultures. I am the biggest vulture you've seen yet," she told Watanuki. "Now you must tell me, did that idiot son of mine ask Yuuko to fetch his daughter as a wish? Because he's running out of things to pay with. Sit, you two. Then introduce yourselves."

"I'm Mokona."

Mokona jumped up on the table. "That one's Watanuki Kimihiro, the rumored carnage boy," "and I do not need a dimensional gateway to introduce me," interrupted Watanuki forcefully. "The friend I came with is a classmate in school. He isn't a henchman."

"Nor do I require you to introduce me. I am Doumeki. Doumeki Shizuka."

"Terribly pleased to meet you, James Bond," the woman smirked. "But I must ask; you look awfully bored. Do you have a problem?"

"You're really the goddess?"

"Do you doubt that?"

"You live in a shabby place."

Watanuki stared at Doumeki in horror. Mokona seemed to enjoy the scene, but Mokona had laughed while playing shiritori in a dark street with spirits dogging their tails for fun. No, Mokona wasn't a sane meter of safety.

Sakurai Shibana looked aggrieved and insulted. The illusions of wealth worked on her and all beings who entered to the extent that the true state of the house didn't matter to her. Doumeki saw a dusty, cobwebby house with cracked china littering the furniture. Watanuki and even Mokona saw an old-fashioned but well-maintained house with expensive hangings and a clean and happy boy hanging off her apron-strings. Quite literally.

"And that boy you talk about. She's a girl. And she's about eight years old. Doesn't she talk?"

Sakurai Shibana looked at Doumeki for a long time. With a long sigh, she pronounced, "Is that how it is, then." She grabbed the tiny boy's wrist fiercely, and at once Watanuki saw what he assumed Doumeki had been seeing the whole time. The excess fat off his cheeks shrank back as his body stretched vertically, the dark hair grew long and matted, and the modern-looking clothes shrank into a child-style yukata. She really did look eight years old. The vacant eyes still stared into his. Those didn't change. She watched from behind the apron.

"It is hardly her fault that she is caught in adult games. But as she is a soulless shell, I only feel a vague curiosity and slight hatred. No pity. This one should be ground into the ground until her memory lies in a stone box- but her death will be more than my life to some. Her blood has a price on it. No, I can't kill her. I'll make you a deal."

Yuuko sipped her tea and watched the rain seep through the rocks of her garden unendingly. She had switched to tea after finding that she had only half a bottle of sake left cold, knowing that starting something she could finish only halfway wasn't worth the effort. She was going to be blindingly, wonderfully smashed tomorrow night and if she wasn't hung over the next morning she was going to know why.

Shuichi had no need to watch the rain. "What are you thinking?"

"Why didn't you tell him about your mother's powers?"

"Why don't you tell him what exactly he could be doing come twenty years with the spiritual strength he has now and the amount it could stand to increase if he learned to ask the right questions?"

"Point taken." Yuuko laughed.

"I don't doubt my mother will toy with him for a few hours. I do know, though, that half the witches and do-gooders of your acquaintance will have her head if she kills the errand boy of a dimensional witch with an unfinished contract half-paid. Half of her acquaintances will have her head for killing her own blood, soul or no soul." Shuichi stabbed the air recalcitrant with his katana.

"Stop that. That's not a toy."

Yuuko was still watching the rain with an uplifted chin.

"I should pay a visit myself, but if I don't apologize, this short life of mine will get cut even shorter than need be. You know how mothers are," he said ironically. "She hasn't forgiven me yet for the stunt about my eyes and she isn't likely to forget that I accidentally split blood with my father and lost her gift of immortality. Even though that was her fault."

Shuichi sighed, stretched out flat on the tatami, and smiled at Yuuko through eyelashes that drank the light out of his eyes.

"I trust that the payment I made will be satisfactory?"

A/N: I suppose the lack of real occurences if inherent in the media I took on- I'm basically writing an elongated episode of xxxHOLiC through a different voice more than through a unique situation. Plus, HOLiC is so Japanese. There's something twisted about a country where pencil shavings signify melancholy, nostalgia, industrialization and God knows what else all in the same five-phrase-two-line poem...human action is, then, too significant to pack in too much of.
So this is what I think of what I wrote. Tell me what you thought of any of what I wrote so far, even a "I love Oscar Wilde (see last chapter's a/n)!".Reviews are my inspiration. I'm happy to update in four days rather than seven if I find some. Unfortunately, when I use Kafka as inspiration, he makes me put in gruesome humor, Anthony Hopkins makes me write calm-and-collected psychopaths, (and the clever ladies who wrote Iolokus for the X-Files universe half a decade ago compounds my sentences and pop-cultures my head) and I can't keep a sense of what the narrator here is supposed to sound like.
/Endspeech.