Author's Notes

A little longer than I wanted it, but I cut down a bit of the scenes to make it fit better with the idea of the child angel, so there wasn't quite enough for two chapters. The child angel wasn't originally a part of the plan; originally it was a regular angel, like the one from xxxHolic, but there was a plot hole I couldn't fill so it morphed into this instead.

And that brings us to the end. It's been a while since I've finished a multichip, but I'm not too happy with the middle of this. I like how this chapter came out though, even if more than half of it was written on the train at 6am. :D

Meetings

'They are very much like you and Dōmeki, Watanuki. But you should be more grateful. After all, you have something more that they don't.' – Yuuko gets an interesting pair of customers…

Kouichi/Koichi K &Yuuko I

"For everything you wish, you have to pay an equal price in return. You can't get more or give more. You can't get less or give less." – Yuko Ichihara

Chapter 5

Balance

'I'm worried,' Watanuki said suddenly, ceasing the repetitive polishing he was engaged with and looking at his employer.

'Are you?' Yuuko asked, sounding almost amused. 'About Himawari?'

'Why would I be worried about her?' Watanuki asked, frowning at Yuuko's smirk. 'Do you know something, Yuuko?'

'You'll find out on due time,' the Dimensional Witch replied, before returning to the original topic. 'You're worried about those twins.'

Watanuki bit back his retort to the first half and simply nodded.

'Yes,' Yuuko mused. 'It is an interesting case. Choice is a very interesting concept, and where there is a choice, it is difficult to predict the outcome.'

'How about that in simple Japanese?' Watanuki said, confused.

Yuuko sighed and pulled her pipe from the inner folds of her kimono, hiving a gentle puff. 'I've always taught you that everything in this world is inevitable,' she explained. 'No meeting between two people happens because of coincidence, but rather that meeting, and whatever bonds form as a result, happen because they were destined to. And with the absence if coincidence, the fine balance of the world is maintained.

'But the thing you humans call choice still exists.' At the frown of confusion, she continued: 'Choice is when two or more paths will inevitably give the same outcome, and it doesn't matter which is taken in terms of the greater balance. Sometimes there is no choice; sometimes there is. A choice is just the catalyst for a chain reaction – and there are sometimes many paths to the same outcome.'

'Like that boy?' Watanuki asked? 'Koichi?'

'Yes,' Yuuko agreed. 'He could have asked me to fulfil his wish, or he could fulfil it himself. Likewise, he could return and accept the offer he'd once rejected, or still try to fulfil it on his own merits. In the end, that wish will likely be granted.'

'Are all wishes like that then?' Watanuki asked. 'Hey, that means –'

'No,' Yuuko smoothly cut in. 'All wishes have the potential to be fulfilled except those which ask for the dead to return to life. But amongst the grantable wishes there is some…discrepancy. Some require what you think of as magic. Some, like yours, need other people. Some could be fulfilled without any intervention at all. And not all of those involve a choice.' Her lips twisted into a smirk again. 'After all, who was it that kept on pushing you and Doumeki together?'

Watanuki muttered something, and Yuuko laughed. 'The two of you are lucky,' she remarked. 'You could have wound up like that boy.'

'Koichi?' He blinked, realising how off course the conversation had veered. 'That's right! I totally forgot.'

Yuuko's expression sobered. 'You felt something different.'

Watanuki nodded, thinking back. 'I'm not sure what, but there was something…strange. And when I mentioned that to…Doumeki – ' He passed the name in a hurry and moved on, but the bite that had been there in their first acquaintances had vanished. ' – he also mentioned his aim in archery – he's in the junior's club – had improved. By a lot.'

'I see.' Yuuko took another puff at her pipe and stood up, picking up the candle that had remained lit with its white core since that wish in the hospital. 'You're going to look for him again, aren't you?' Without waiting for an answer, she thrust the lit candle into the boy's hands. 'Take this with you, and should he give you that journal to pass on to me, give this back to him.'

'Are you crazy?' Watanuki yelped. 'How am I supposed to carry a lit candle around?'

'Just put it in your bag of course,' Yuuko smirked, before turning serious again. 'Two more things. Take Doumeki with you, and don't draw its attention unless you want to become dinner this time.'

Watanuki remembered her giving a similar warning once before. But he didn't remember seeing the wings that had prompted if.

He could see the wings now: white ones, not small but transparent in the backdrop of grey night sky. They looked almost young, like a child pretending to be an adult but failing miserably.

A child angel. He felt cold at the thought, remembering how the last angel he'd seen had devoured that poor girl's soul. It didn't look like Doumeki could see them; his expression hadn't changed since they'd come, watching the boy on the roof. He'd been sitting against the fence then. He was standing and gripping it now.

No. He was climbing it now. Climbing the criss-crosses of wired fence like it was a ladder. Watanuki almost stood in alarm; Doumeki quickly grabbing his wrist stopped him. 'Yuuko said not to draw his attention,' he said calmly.

'Well, I'm sorry,' Watanuki retorted. 'I should just let a kid jump off a roof –'

'Look.'

Watanuki looked. The boy had sat himself on the top of the fence, like someone would sit on a low wall or the single layer of bricks around the oval. 'Oh,' he said. 'I thought he – ' He didn't bother finishing the statement – and, to be fair, it wasn't that outlandish an idea either. Yuuko had told him that many who became hosts to an angel eventually killed: either themselves, or others in their path.

'What now?' Doumeki asked. 'Can you see anything?'

'Except little wings,' Watanuki replied, 'nothing out of – ' He stopped suddenly, seeing something else. 'That other guy's coming.'

Of course, since the other guy was a human and not a spirit, Doumeki had no problem spotting him either.

'Let's go,' Watanuki whispered.

This time, Doumeki followed him.

Koji could see the wings as well. He didn't know why, or even what they were, but he knew they were there when they shouldn't be.

They looked like angel wings, though smaller and somehow more unnerving. Maybe it was the naïve image of angels he still clung to: the idea that they were perfect and incapable of any image of negativity, or maybe it was just seeing them on somebody's, much less the guy who was his brother's, back.

Angels were things associated more with the dead than the living after all. To be on the back of someone who was still alive was… He didn't know what it was, but it was ominous. Superstitious even, and he'd just seen another superstition, about the crossroads, come true. The image of those wings weren't easily dismissed.

They looked even more eerie framed by the moon and supported by nothing save the thin wires criss-crossed into the fence and its slightly sturdier frame. Even if Koichi wasn't sitting straight, facing the moon directly. He was sitting with one leg over each side of the fence, twisted to face the moon full on but enough on the other side to be safe.

Or so Koji hoped anyway. He wouldn't have dared to sit up that high, on a fence that looked so flimsy and where there was nothing to catch you if you fell. That was the comforting part of the fence: on this side, you were safe no matter where you fell.

Once you were on the other side though, not even those angel wings could save a falling figure.

Koichi noticed him and turned, his eyes looking hollow in the effects of the moonlight. 'What do you want?' he asked, voice as flat as those eyes.

Koji actually hadn't heard his voice properly before, but it didn't match at all to the shout on the crossroad he still recalled. 'Dad said you were around here,' he said, somewhat uncomfortably. 'I was…' He trailed off. Worried and guilty were both words that came to mind, but neither of them were ones he wanted to say. 'What are you doing up there?' he asked instead. 'Aren't you scared?'

'Scared?' the other repeated monotonously. 'Freedom is within reach here.'

'Freedom?' Koji stared at his brother, then at the darkness and the moon that spread on the other side of the fence. 'You can't – ' His tongue fumbled on the thoughts. 'Those wings can't fly!'

'Wings?' Koichi looked surprise for a moment and some inflexion crept into his tone before both vanished to give way to monotony again. 'Why fly? It's much easier to simply…fall.'

'Fall?' Koji repeated mechanically, though failing to reach the monotone of his brother. For a moment the word just echoed without sense, and then it clicked like a string of electricity passing between two things. 'What are you trying to do?! Kill yourself?!' There was a mix of shock, panic and anger in the tone. He still didn't know what the lady who called herself the Dimensional Witch had demanded from him, but he knew she'd done something. Beyond that, he knew how his parents – all three of them – had suffered for him, for Koichi, and for the other to be so careless with that life…

But the wings looked bigger now, and the voice still seemed distinguished from that one he'd first met, and remembered. As if it wasn't the same person, or…

The white wings glared at him.

Possessed. The word almost fell from his lips. He's possessed.

'You'll die,' he repeated, faintly, almost pleadingly. 'You don't want to die…do you?'

He didn't know the answer to that. Maybe his brother did want to die; maybe he hadn't wanted to live, to be saved. How would he know? He was just a deaf and blind guy who hadn't seen what was around him, who'd ignored all the signs until they crashed right behind him.

'You don't want to die…do you?'

No. No, he didn't want to die. He wanted to live. He'd said that, and it was the truth: a truth he'd said, entrusted to the world, a chain he'd wrought around himself to bind its fulfilment to him. He wanted to live.

'I promised you freedom!'

His body spasmed. He was gripping something cold, something largely smooth, but parts of it were digging into his hands all the same.

'Let go!'

'But…you'll die.'

He didn't want to die.

'Don't you want to be free?'

He did.

'You can't!'

Why not?

'Fall?'

Fall? He'd fall.

'No! You'd be free!'

He'd fall. Falling meant dying. He didn't want to die. He'd tied himself to that. He'd promised himself.

Something tore his back, and the internal conflict was wiped from his mind by pure pain.

Watanuki blinked, preoccupied with the little angel withering and tearing itself in the air. 'What - ?' he began hesitantly, before being distracted by a whimpered scream behind him and Doumeki brushing past.

It was a good thing he had though, because the boy who'd just been the angel's host had lost both consciousness and his grip on the fence. He'd been lucky to fall their way – or maybe it wasn't luck, Watanuki thought. He didn't think anyone who was willing to die would sit so perfectly in the centre of the fence. It put a new image to the phrase "on the fence".

Seeing as Doumeki had the real world issue under control, he returned his attention to the angel. He wondered if it was Doumeki's presence that was keeping it away, or if it was just too weak and forced to abandon his host too prematurely.

'Don't be fooled,' Yuuko said, suddenly appearing behind him as she sometimes did. 'That angel is not yet dead.' Her eyes were narrowed as she watched. 'Unfortunately, it's too small and insubstantial to catch, so it will simply return to the crossroads between worlds and wait until another potential host comes along. It gained nothing from this encounter after all; its life is too large a price to pay for that.'

'Then…' Watanuki looked at Doumeki, who was following the younger of the two twins.

'He's fine.' Yuuko shrugged. 'Better than fine actually; he won't remember what happened.'

'And the brother?' Watanuki asked.

'That's the price he has to pay for saving someone who didn't ask to be saved,' was the reply. 'Though that boy had already chosen to live and those words had bound him, that was his choice, not his brothers. Koji's Minamoto's choice was an altogether different nature, and the knowledge of what it entails is a heavier price than it appears.' She withdrew her pipe lit it, watching the smoke waft into the night sky. 'All this could have been avoided if he'd just turned around, but he'd chosen not to.' She watched Doumeki and the twins disappear. 'In the end, their fate to meet did not change. That is the inevitability that follows choice.'

'Yuuko's not here right now,' Watanuki said, the moment he heard the shop's chime tinkle. 'I'm afraid – oh.'

The visitor was a familiar one, wrapped in a new jacket and cradling a familiar black book to his chest.

'I just came to give this to Miss Yuuko,' Koichi said, offering the book. 'Could you pass it on?'

Watanuki stared at the book for a moment, before recognising it. 'Oh,' he said again, before shaking his head. 'Right, Yuuko told me – ' He left the statement unfinished, almost tripping over his duster while reaching for his bookbag and pulling out the candle. It was still lit, but no longer with its white centre. 'Here; Yuuko told me to return this to you when you came.'

He took the book and placed it on the coffee table he'd already dusted, and Koichi took the candle. The moment he touched it, its flame went out, leaving the wick unsinged and the candlestick still whole.

Watanuki asked about that later, and why the price was changed.

'The price was not changed,' Yuuko replied. 'The journal for Mokona's listening ear. The loan of the candle for the delay. That same candle was what, on his brother's wish, guided him in the crossroads.'

'Then what would have happened if he'd given you the journal to begin with?' Watanuki asked, somewhat aghast.

'Who knows,' Yuuko said with a slight smile. 'Choices are what make the world interesting after all.'

'Yuuko!' Watanuki cried. 'These are people's lives you're talking about.'

'Quiet down, Watanuki,' Yuuko sighed, rubbing her temples. 'You're getting entirely too involved in this affair.

'What do you plan to do with that journal anyway?'

Yuuko smirked. 'Publish it of course.

'But that's – that's illegal!'

'Of course it's not you silly boy. This – ' She held up the black book. ' – is mine now. Though it's a shame you didn't ask what changed his mind when you had the chance.'

That hadn't even occurred to Watanuki, nor did it quite register at this time. 'Don't change the subject!'