The Missing Eyes Ch. 04

Language Notes: Awamori is from Okinawa. Recommendations go to the legally able of you.

Which was all very nice, but why was he walking out again in another pointless search that shouldn't be his? One day he was going to hire flunkies of his own and damn it all to hell, they were going to suffer through every one of their reincarnated states until he crushed them in their grasshopper lives in a chloroformed bottle.

Deals. Drinking houses. Searching for a prostitute in a drinking house.

Why?

The alternative was feeling guilty for letting Tokyo flood, of course, or getting killed by attempting to rob the goddess Sakurai Shibana of her grandchild by force. Watanuki kicked a pebble and immediately regretted scuffing his shoes before he could afford new ones.

"Turn left here?"

Doumeki turned right and kept walking. "You have no sense of direction."

Watanuki sputtered. "The lady never mentioned a single right turn!"

"She said to look for a temple and to circle it until we found the house in the back. It's the same distance both ways."

"Then you might as well have turned left like I suggested!"

Sputtering was, apparently, not a good look for the day. Watanuki had to run to catch up. Mokona was staring out of the basket at the temple intently. His wide eyes focused on a shoji screen.

"There's someone in there," Mokona said in a monotone. Then his normal voice returned and Mokona was cheering as Watanuki tripped over his feet in his haste to get away from the something-or-the-other Mokona claimed to have seen. Doumeki walked steadily onwards, circling the temple toward a cluster of lights. Watanuki reflected on the terms of the deal.

One; he had to find the girl, the woman's daughter-in-law that Amai had divorced when he'd been cursed with his bidding to watch over typhoons on Mainland Japan. Two; this prostitute needed to return with him to Sakurai. Three; he had to get back within a couple of hours including the walking time or Tokyo was toast. Metaphorically speaking, that is. It was porridge more than toast at the moment, and at any moment it was likely to convert itself to soup. Four; he needed to convince Amai to take the girl's eyes back and send the child's soul on the merry way out of limbo. To resurrection. Although why Amai had resisted until now to do this escaped him, and how Watanuki was supposed to change Amai after this much time was a mystery.

"Irasshaimase!"

"Irrashaimase!"

Two near-identical voices with an unnerving likenesses to Maru and Moro greeted Watanuki and Doumeki from either side as they entered the yellow-lit shop. China dresses were apparently the order of the day, and a yukata falling off a woman's shoulders displayed itself prominently in the back of the shop. The woman stood.

"Two of you? Would you like to be seated separately or together?"

Mokona poked its unfortunate head out exactly at this time. The two girls at the door giggled in delight and crowded Watanuki's bag. Doumeki stared straight ahead. Watanuki, flustered, bit out a quick answer.

"We, ah, were sent on an errand; we're not customers. Do you know a," he paused. He had no idea what this mystery daughter-in-law was called. "I'm not here as a customer. A woman sent me, her name is Sakurai Shibana."

With all the slow seduction in the world, a voice hummed in Watanuki's ear, "Not a customer, hmm?" The woman with the yukata was edging dangerously close to Doumeki now. "Are you sure?"

"Of course we're sure." Watanuki yelped as the woman smiled a closed-lipped smile. "Do any of your coworkers know a Sakurai Shibana, or take the name Amai?"

A woman stood gracefully, conspicuously so, from a windowside table next to a drunk man that seemed about to topple over. She'd seemed rapt in the man's attentions until moments ago, but she had apparently listened in. The man, however drunk, took notice when the woman stood to leave him.

"Hey!" he protested, but the woman ignored him and stepped up to Watanuki. "Acquaintance of my mother's, are you." Watanuki, unable to deny the accusation disguised as a question, backed against the now-closed door. She said, mildly this time, "I suppose I will have to go with you. I was waiting for her, but summons are summons."

The woman bowed to the less-than-conscious drunk she had been entertaining, then to the other women scattered attractively throughout the shop.

"Bella, you can't just leave, your shift has hardly started."

The woman, or rather Bella, had other ideas. She waved at the woman in the yukata and bade her to "take it out of the debt" or something and ducked out of the shop's doorway to a familiar swirl of colors or a lack thereof and dizziness. They were on the Ginza.

Watanuki felt faint as they stepped out to front garden of Garden Heights.

"Would your complete name be Belladonna," Doumeki asked the voluptuous figure. He appraised her from toe-up impassively. Watanuki gaped from his bent and ungraceful posture. "It rather fits the motif of this building. And how is it that the Ginza linked you to here but Ichihara Yuuko couldn't pinpoint the house any better than a train station half an hour away?"

Bella smiled. She really had been startlingly beautiful, not just voluptuous, in her day. "I haven't been called anything but Bella for a few years now. I am really," she flourished a black rose from her cerulean silk hair ribbon, "quite the belle of the ball. And as for the Ginza- well, I always had a good homing instinct." With the usual flair for the dramatics the more intelligently insane show, she stepped toward the door of Garden Heights and clicked her way through the door in precisely stepping stilettos.

Watanuki had a bad feeling the first couple clauses of his deal with Sakurai-sann were just a bad scam. Mokona poked his head out of the bag.

"Mokona and women that wear cerulean don't seem to agree. Your time's running out- I'll turn into the crocodile from Peter Pan if you don't watch out. Tic toc." With that, Mokona refused further commentary.

Watanuki half-hid behind Doumeki as they walked after Bella. It was a classic Bad Feeling moment, the sort even Watanuki thought people in horror movies would know better than to follow. That was exactly why Watanuki was walking forward in the pseudo-darkness of apartment-grade lightbulbs at 9:00 in the night. Watanuki, king of fools.

He was right, he reflected: the moment they entered the damn place they met ambush by Bella and Shibana Sakurai. The women each grabbed a boy and flung them into the room that certainly looked nothing like what Watanuki saw the last time he'd been in there. The living room had been cleared out to show only the paintings on the four walls, four to a wall and in a complex geometric pattern that reminded him inexplicably of Sudoku. Exits on two opposite sides of the room, one to the genkan and one to the dining room.Which was all very well had they not been tied up as well. And where was Mokona?

"Watanuki, you need to get out of here!"

Mokona hurtled out of the bag and bounced on his face. Cast complete, they could safely be assassinated. With luck, Watanuki wouldn't see anything coming what with Mokona's feet getting in the way of vision. Then shadows fell across the room from both sides of the room. Watanuki thought the walls were collapsing in on them when the two women walked in, Bella from the genkan and Sakurai from the dining room. No convenient R2D2 this time to open up an escape hatch.

Weren't the women both in the genkan thirty seconds ago anyway?

"You've done a wonderful job. You've even brought me my friend so that I can share my new toy."

Bella added, "I thought it was all over when my friend let my nickname slip. I'd forgotten how stupid you schoolboys are."

Friends, Romans, Goddesses, lend me your knives for a quick-and-easy slaughter. Amen. They brought their heads down over the boys and smiled with a terrible symmetry.

"We're two of a whole,"

"One daughter to four,"

"Most easily classified as—"

"Doppelgangers."

"Doumeki-kunn is right, of course. Belladonna is my preferred name in this world; I am a death flower, stripped of my immortality and status by Shuichi choosing his idiot father over me."

Watanuki ventured, "Did you gain immortality by marrying Amai Shuichi, then?"

Belladonna looked at him scornfully. "I was a favored acolyte to Shibana here for two millennia, and I accrued my own following over time. She and I began to split her rule. Mortals worshipped us as being one and the same. She had her first son only a few decades ago, and dismissed me and granted me mortality so that I could seduce her son and guard him when he became an adult. I never quit being faithful."

Shibana continued, "Shuichi cooperated for the best part of thirty years. He married Shibana, and under his protection, she became immortal once more. Then he got wind of his father."

"How is it, Shuichi-kunn, that you cursed your own immortality in the short few years I didn't see you? Surely you were a little more competent than that."

"Watch it, woman," was his amused reply. "You know I went looking for that half-assed moron my mother refused to marry, with good reason not to. He asked me to claim him as a father and I did it in a snit against my mother."

Yuuko gave him a sidelong glance. "Starting bloodline-altering rituals in a snit?"

He tossed back his last sip of Awamori and shrugged. "I didn't realize that my immortality was going to slip away to him until I already gave my dad half that pint of blood, and when I slammed my hand into the fire to stop the ritual, I managed to curse my direct beneficiaries along with myself. Classic story."

Yuuko looked at the Awamori distrustfully. It was alcohol; it had sat around in storage in its vase for half a year now, but it wasn't mainland material. "Classic? You're the first one stupid enough to try it for the most recent part of remembered history, you mean."

"My mother never informed me that recognizing my father to his rightful place when she denied him the same place would mean my immortality had to go."

Yuuko snorted.

Shuichi sat up and poured himself another cup. "It's not so bad. Chicken pox or scarlet fever could be my death, sure, but I rarely let kindergarteners breathe on me and it shouldn't matter too much."

"It's no wonder there aren't that many of the gods' descendants cluttering this country today with their immortality. You don't live long enough or conventionally enough to make a difference."

"With any luck, I won't pass the century mark and I'll have died before I got assigned godly status. I hear it's a pain."

"Exactly." Yuuko poured yet another cup of lukewarm tea for herself. "I wonder if Watanuki and Doumeki are nearly done."

A/N: I saw the movie version of xxxHOLiC. What my reviewers are saying is that Doumeki can't enter the shop. What the movie shows is Doumeki and Himawari sitting in the shop asking for sushi after their great adventure in that rigged house... I'd go with the movie being part of canon, if I may. I'll add another wrinkle to this story if I get too many complaints, but let's just go with this for now.