He was watching Watanuki destroy himself.
Maybe Yuuko would have called it developing, rather than destroying.
But no, she'd disappeared. It was hard to stay level headed about something like that, even being as even tempered as Doumeki was. He could hardly imagine how Watanuki was faring.
Maybe it wasn't her fault. That didn't matter. What did matter was that she had disappeared, and that she probably knew she would too. That was what angered him the most; she knew Watanuki, what he'd been through – even as he didn't.
What was worse, for Doumeki at least, was that he could do nothing to stop either Watanuki's pain or Yuuko's. It was in his nature to let things come to him as they would, if he couldn't stop it, and not be frustrated. But it was also in his nature to do all he could, given a situation.
But they were adaptable, Doumeki and Watanuki. They could relearn their rhythm, relearn how to live. Actually, Doumeki had been relearning how to live since the day he met Watanuki and he liked to think that maybe Watanuki was too.
They had many memories together, them, Yuuko, Kohane, Himawari, the twins, and all of the people they had met along the way. Maybe the memories couldn't make up for the ones Watanuki had lost, but Doumeki knew they could come close.
Before he met Watanuki, he'd never really been interested in anything.
Doumeki had seen Watanuki at school before. The bespectacled teen had been little more than a ghost, going through the motions, unattached. He had a vacant, vague smile, as though distracted – and perhaps he was, Doumeki couldn't see the spirits that plagued Watanuki at the time. Maybe it was that tenuous attachment to the world that Watanuki had that first interested Doumeki.
And Doumeki had also watched him grow, to learn that others cared for him, just as he cared for others. Even as Watanuki's hold to the world – their world, the one that they used to inhabit – grew weaker, his hold on himself, as a person, grew stronger. Doumeki wonders if that was Yuuko's original goal, not that he's ever really asked why Watanuki came to her in the first place. He'd surmised it, fairly early on in their acquaintanceship too, though it wasn't very hard to figure out.
He will wait for Watanuki to realize things - wait for Watanuki to figure everything out, as was his right. He'll wait for Watanuki, as he always does; he knows it means much to the other boy. Not that Watanuki would admit it.
But one day, he would.
He was watching Watanuki destroy himself; just as surely as he himself was being torn apart.
But things that are destroyed, so too become greater.
