Watanuki was still thoroughly embarrassed by the time they made their way back to the temple. Hearing from a dead relative that his personal habits had pretty much been on display for his whole life was bad enough – knowing they'd been on display when he and Doumeki were intimate was downright mortifying. He seemed to be the only one that cared, though. If he hadn't been there he might have even been able to pretend that Doumeki didn't even hear that part of the conversation for all that it seemed to bother him. (Which was not at all, of course.)

It was probably better to just never, ever mention that part of the conversation for as long as he lived. Watanuki wanted to do nothing but shove that subject neatly under the rug where it would never, ever be heard from again. He knew if he never left the temple grounds that not even good spirits could sneak up on him, so perhaps he could just hole up in the shrine and never come out again. It just might save him a lifetime of further embarrassment, even if he did have to become a hermit for it.

"Oi."

Not that Doumeki would let him, if the overbearing oaf likely had anything to say about it. Doumeki liked to ruin all of Watanuki's carefully laid out plans of avoiding awkward situations.

"Oi." Doumeki said again.

"My name's not 'Oi.'" He automatically replied. Funny how some responses were just reflex, now.

"Did you look at that book yet?" He looked pointedly at the massive, ancient looking tome in Watanuki's hands.

He looked down at the book, too, carefully turning it over in his hands as they all continued to walk back home from the park. He'd had only a little time to crack open the cover and look at some of the pages before they had packed up the picnic. "A little." He stared at it in some annoyance. "Some of the pages look like they're in English, but even then most of it looks like gibberish. I don't know how I'm expected to read this thing."

"English, is that so?" Haruka asked. He pointed to the book. "May I look at it?"

"Please!" Watanuki exclaimed. "Maybe you can translate it for me!" He handed the leather bound tome over, happy to have some help with the cryptic thing.

Haruka took the book and scanned the pages that opened up to him. He flipped through a few more, humming thoughtfully out load. "Well… that's interesting." He flipped through a few more pages. "Very interesting, indeed."

"Can you read it? Did you see anything useful?" Watanuki asked hopefully.

Haruka closed the book and handed it back to the teenager. "I'm afraid not. The pages look completely blank to me."

"What?!" Watanuki yelled in shock. "Blank! How can they look blank?" He stopped and flipped through more of the thick vellum pages. "But look! I think some of this looks like it's in Latin, too! Also, see here?" He pointed to another page. "Ancient Japanese! I don't recognize most of these Kanji!"

Haruka smiled at him amicably, apparently not upset in the least by this information. "Nope. Still blank."

Doumeki grabbed the book out of Watanuki's hands and started to peruse it himself. "Huh. Blank for me, too."

"B-but!" Watanuki flailed. "This isn't any help! How am I supposed to use this if I can't translate it and I'm the only one that can see what's written in it?!"

Akane looked over her son's shoulder to the open, seemingly empty pages herself. "How very strange. I can't see anything, either. It must be meant just for your eyes only, Kimihiro-kun."

The teenager took the book back with much reluctance from Doumeki's hands. "This could take forever…"

Doumeki's grandfather smiled encouragingly. "I'm sure you'll translate things as you're ready to learn them. Magic books can be stubborn like that. It's why I've never kept many in my library, they are very little good to me and don't allow most people to read them."

As they turned down another corner the entrance to the shrine came into view. Watanuki looked to the scroll held in Doumeki's hand, still tied with the brown twine. "What about that?" He asked suddenly. "Did you look at that? Can you read it?"

In fact, he hadn't look at it yet. Doumeki pulled the twine from the scroll and unrolled it carefully. "I can see writing on it." This was supposed to be the 'solution' to his partner's eye problem. He wondered what it would say.

"Well?!" Watanuki pressed as the other teenager studied the scroll. "What does it say?"

Doumeki frowned. "I'm reading it. It's complicated."

Watanuki bounced from foot to foot impatiently as Doumeki's eyes scanned down the paper. A few minutes after making into the shrine and removing their shoes still had the teenager deep in concentration over it.

The spell called itself The Split Eye. It started off talking about the dangers and permanence of adjusting one's eyesight in any way, then moved on to the benefits of taking partial vision from creatures such as birds and deer to increase visibility over vast distances. The spell then detailed very, very complicated looking diagrams of eyes, symbols, sweeping curves and variable times and ridiculous looking calculations that used more discreet symbols than Doumeki had ever seen, even in his advanced mathematics class. Oh. Oh. It took him a moment to make the connection on what they were supposed to do with this.

Mr. Reed was right. This didn't seem very clean at all. Watanuki was going to throw a fit. "Here." He handed the scroll over. "It says I'm supposed to share one of my eyes with you."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!" Watanuki declared. "Let me look over this, I'll bet you read it wrong." He grabbed the unrolled scroll and locked his one working eye on the contents.

There was a long stretch of silence as everyone waited in the hallway while Watanuki read over the spell carefully. The longer he read the paler his face became. "This… this can't be right. It talks about taking eye sight from other creatures and warns about giving up your own. How did you get out of this that we would… we'd…" Here, he stopped and stared. His face was a picture of disbelief. "How can you think… one of your eyes?! You're crazy!" He rolled up the scroll. "I won't accept it."

Haruka snatched the paper from Watanuki's hand and looked at it himself. It did seem rather drastic, but what the boys discussed was indeed what the spell told to do.

"Your Great-Great Grandfather handed it to me," Doumeki pointed out. "You did see what the side effects are, right? If you're ever in danger and I'm not there, I'll be able to see where you're at. I'll have an easier ability to see what you see – which means I could see spirits better, too. He gave the scroll to me because I'm the one that has to agree to this, which I already have."

"But… share an eye? How does that work?" Akane asked of them. "It doesn't make any sense to me."

"That's the way magic is," Haruka said. "The spell would drain half of the vision in one of Shizuka's eyes and give that vision to Kimihiro-kun. The right eye, mind you. It would not restore any vision in Kimihiro-kun's right eye if Shizuka-kun took the vision from his left eye."

"No!" Watanuki insisted again. "I'm not damaging your vision over this! We'll find another way!"

"Don't you think if there was a better option Mr. Reed would have given it to us?" Doumeki asked him. "This is what we are going to do."

"Haruka-san! Akane-san, tell him he's crazy!" Watanuki pleaded. He looked back to Doumeki. "You can't ask me to do this!"

Akane looked at the scroll in her father's hands, the words on it looking to be written in Greek for all she could tell. "It does seem… a little extreme, but if there's really no other way, then it's up to Shizuka-kun." She bit down a little on the nail on her thumb. "I can't imagine he'd want you to stay half blinded if there was some way he could fix it."

"I'm afraid Akane-chan is right, Kimihiro-kun. As… drastic as this option seems, this is between the two of you," Haruka said slowly. "This is something that would affect you both permanently, and this option does have some merits. You'll need to think this over carefully together." He tried to hand the scroll back to him but Watanuki refused to take it. His expression stated it was the most offensive thing he'd ever seen up to that point in his life.

Doumeki took it instead. "We're going to."

"We are not!"

He started directing his partner to their shared bedroom. "Yes we are, even if I have to convince you."

"That will never happen!"

"I'm good at convincing you to do things."

"This is completely different!"

When the boys were out of earshot Akane looked to her father, her expression worried. "Is this really the best option?"

Haruka shrugged and sat down at the kitchen table. "Who am I to say? I'm not a wizard and don't actually know much about things like this. I believe Shizuka-kun was right when he pointed out if a better option did exist, it would have been given." He took out a rolled cigarette from one of his pockets and lit it. "Mr. Reed also said this would prove to be the best option in time. Who knows what he's seen of things to come? This may be more important than we can realize right now."

Akane sat down too with a heavy sigh. "I guess. I don't know anything about this, either." They could still hear Watanuki yelling his refusal to Doumeki a few rooms away. "Do you really think he'll convince Kimihiro-kun?"

Haruka smiled slightly as the shouted phrase biggest walking idiot ever in the history of idiots floated down the hallway. "If he's supposed to."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Doumeki had never seen Watanuki be so stubborn before. He had expected it, of course, having witnessed the fits his partner had in the past, but that didn't make it any less frustrating. "Kimihiro, I'm not changing my mind. We are doing this spell."

His face was red with righteous anger. "We are not! I'm not changing my mind, either! How can you even ask me to take part of your vision? Don't you know how crazy this is!"

"How could I forget? You keep reminding me," was his deadpan reply.

"I keep reminding you because you keep saying we're doing this!" He stomped his foot partly in frustration and partly to help make his point clear. "No is no!"

Feeling exasperated, Doumeki quickly snatched the glasses from his partner's face, then the eye patch that covered the sightless eye. "Hey!" Watanuki protested.

Doumeki cupped the other teenager's face and held him firm, locking their eyesight together. "Do not ask me to stare at this empty spot for the rest of our lives!" He stressed. "Not when there is a solution on hand right now to cure this. Let me share this burden with you."

Tears leaked out of Watanuki's left eye. Not his right eye, though, which seemed to have lost its main tear ducts from the acid. The right side remained dry and placid. He tried to shake his head, Doumeki's hands still not letting go of him. "How can I do this to you? Why do you always get your way?"

"Because I'm right, and you're too stubborn for your own good."

"Pot calling the kettle black! I'm stubborn? Not as stubborn as you are!"

Doumeki removed one of his hands from his partner's cheeks and held up the scroll from Mr. Reed. He had to be more stubborn than Watanuki, who else would look out for him? "Perform the spell."

His shoulders shook from holding back the annoying tears that kept leaking down his face. Damn, why did he have to get so emotional over these things? Stupid Doumeki with his stupid expressionless face and stupid stubborn as a mule attitude. Unwillingly he opened the scroll and looked over the instructions once again, his face pinched. "Of course. Stupid, stupid spell."

"Can you do it easily?"

"It's not fair," he whined. "That book is in foreign languages yet this dumb thing just seems to keep rearranging itself as I read it to make it simpler and simpler." He wiped at his face. "This shouldn't be so stupidly easy."

Doumeki looked over the page again, the archaic and complicated equations looking as undecipherable as ever. His grandfather was right when he said magic books were tricky. "Do it," he encouraged, hopefully before Watanuki lost his nerve again and started with more refusals.

Slowly and suddenly quiet, Watanuki lifted his right hand and held his palm in front of Doumeki's right eye. The look on his face said he may as well have been putting injured kittens to sleep, he looked so sad. He took a deep breath, then pulled.

Nothing looked outwardly different and Doumeki didn't feel anything. However after a minute a small, yellow glow of light started to swirl just in front of Watanuki's palm. Things started to look fuzzy in one eye for Doumeki. Colors and edges started to blur slightly, growing closer and closer together the longer they stood there.

After a few more seconds Watanuki took a small step back and held up his hand, the small yellow orb over his fingers bobbing lazily up and down. "Please," he pleaded. "Don't make me do this."

He looked at the softly glowing orb, realizing how strange it was to be looking at half of the vision from one of his own eyes. He snaked his arms around his partner's waist and held him as close as possible without bumping the hand holding half of his eye. "It's all right." His hand pressed into the small of Watanuki's back. "This is what I want you to do."

Frowning, sadder than ever, Watanuki brought the orb up to his mouth, took a breath, then swallowed it.

Doumeki's eyelid fluttered involuntarily as Watanuki swallowed the orb. That was a strange feeling. His vision was still the same now, half blurry on the right and still perfect on the left, the tickling sensation lasting only a moment.

When his eyes opened again, one eye shone blue and the other a tawny gold. To anyone that wouldn't know better his eyes could have been heterochromatic. Doumeki thought the look rather striking. "Can you see now?"

He blinked a few times, then put his glasses back on. "…Yes," he said at length. His great-great grandfather's spectacles sat perched lightly on his nose. "I can see fine, out of both of them. The glasses seem to make up for the difference on both sides." He removed the glasses, looked around the room, then snorted. "It figures that half of your sight is still better than all of the sight I had."

Doumeki hugged him tightly. "I'll try getting a contact for my right eye. Maybe it will work."

He did not hug back right away. "It's going to be a long time before I forgive you for this. In fact, I just might not forgive you, you were an ass about this."

"That's fine," Doumeki agreed easily. "You're what I care about most."

"Crazy jackass."

"Idiot." It was hard to hide the affection in that insult, not that Doumeki tried.