xxxHolic/Discworld, take 5
Nov. 30th, 2006 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopAnother part to the xxxHolic/Discworld series that just keeps on extending ^^;. This started out as a missing scene from near the end of Binky, but wound up long enough to be declared an extra part in its own right. The first part Just Another Tuesday is up here in case anyone's looking for it.
Title: A Death in the Family
Summary: Watanuki meets another member of the Death family. Susan is introduced to some lesser known Japanese spirits, and our hero is introduced to some novel ways of dealing with them.
Spoilers: Nothing important, though you'd probably want to read the previous parts of the series first.
There was a knock on the door to Yuuko’s shop. This was unusual, not just because there weren’t many parts of the door you could knock on without putting your fist right through the paper, but also because most of Yuuko’s customers found themselves in through the door before they knew what was happening. The woman who was there when Watanuki opened it, however, looked like she was determined to do this properly, regardless of whether anyone else noticed or not. She seemed normal, which was to say that there was an aggressive sort of normality about her that Watanuki probably wouldn’t have dared question even if there’d been tiny planets orbiting around her head. She didn’t look Japanese, but given that it was the end of the week, Watanuki was just prepared to be glad it wasn’t the skeleton in the cowl again.
He was yet to discover that, given the right circumstances, Susan was capable of being far the scarier of the two.
“My grandfather,” said the woman, “asked me to pick up Binky for him.” Something about the way she said ‘asked’ implied that the proper word would have been ‘sent’, except that she was not the sort of person who was ‘sent’ anywhere, least of all by the man in question.
“Aha?” said Watanuki vaguely. The word ‘grandfather’ in that sentence had fried the part of his brain that would otherwise have allowed him to come up with a more helpful response. Animated skeletons (cowled or otherwise) did not have descendents – it was very important to Watanuki’s little remaining sanity that nothing contradicted that. On the other hand, the shinigami had talked about someone called ‘Albert’ a lot, maybe this could be a relative of his?
It was probably fortunate that Yuuko chose this moment to do her appearing trick in the hall behind him and came to his rescue. “Of course. Binky is around the back of the shop. Maru, Moro, would you bring him around for us?” The girls ran off with twin cries of ‘horsey!’
The woman did not look satisfied. “Your shop keeps trying to convince me it’s not here,” she complained, making it very clear that no shop could possibly engage in more impolite behaviour.
“The shop is only visible to those who need its services,” Yuuko told her, in her usual authoritatively smug manner. “You don’t have any wishes you need granted, do you?”
The question went ignored. “My grandfather still can’t get in. How were you planning on sending Binky back once your week was up?” There was something odd about her voice that gave Watanuki the headache-inducing impression that she didn’t actually speak a word of Japanese, but was going to have words with anyone who dared misunderstand her.
“Oh, something was bound to come up,” Yuuko’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “And here you are! Can I offer you some tea?”
The sound of clopping hooves and girlish giggles meant that Maru and Moro had finished their task. “No thankyou,” said their guest curtly, “I should be on my way.”
“Very well. Why don’t you walk Susan back to the lot, Watanuki?”
Watanuki let out a sigh. “She probably doesn’t mean that as a suggestion,” he told… Susan, apparently, though he couldn’t remember any names being exchanged. He wasn’t especially keen on the idea. Quite apart from the fact that Susan gave the impression she was determined to be angry at someone and it might as well be him, an amorphous blob with feet had been following him around all morning. It couldn’t get into the shop, of course, but he knew it would be waiting for him the moment he stepped outside.
“If you must.” Susan replied, though at least this didn’t particularly seem to bother her, and turned towards the door. As they went past, she patted Binky on the nose in an absent sort of way. She didn’t take the halter, but Binky seemed to understand what was expected of him and followed her out. The ease of it all made Watanuki slightly jealous.
Once they were out on the street, Susan finally seemed to notice him properly and looked him up and down a few times. “You’d be some sort of part-time help to the witch then, I suppose.”
“More or less.” Though he had to admit the only ‘less’ part was whether or not this was entirely voluntary, and whether he was getting paid in any conventional sense.
“How on earth did you get my grandfather to lend you Binky?” Susan didn’t sound quite like she was holding him personally responsible, though still as though she knew he’d been involved and was fully convinced the whole mess could have been avoided if he’d just put in a little more effort. “He’s not something he rents out for children’s parties on weekends.”
“I don’t know, it was all Yuuko’s doing! I had nothing to do with it. Hardly anything!” Watanuki clarified, because Susan was not the sort of person you could get away with half truths with. “Look, I’m just the messenger, and I didn’t ask for even that.”
“Do you know what my grandfather has been using instead this past week?” Without giving him time to hazard a guess, she went on. “Neither do I, but every time I bring the subject up, Albert goes a colour I don’t think there’s a name for.”
The Albert Theory of Susan’s ancestry had just lost an awful lot of water. Worse still, the way she was talking about her grandfather as the owner of the horse had revived that other theory that Watanuki had been mentally denying he’d ever thought of. “Wait, you’re… you’re Death's granddaughter?!”
Susan sighed. “By adoption. Did you only just figure that out?”
“Yuuko doesn’t tell me these things!” Watanuki wailed. Although she probably would have, added a voice in his head, just to see you react like that.
“No, I suppose she wouldn’t, would she?” said Susan, though not unkindly.
They both fell silent for a bit. Over Watanuki and Susan’s footsteps and the clop of Binky’s hooves, it was a little difficult to make out the pattering of an extra set of feet, but…
Susan frowned. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, and turned around.
The next thing anyone knew, the thing with the pattering feet had had been pinned up against the nearest convenient wall. Somewhere in the middle of an amorphous blob with feet, Susan had managed to find an arm to pin behind its back. From the look on the thing’s… for lack of a better word – ‘face’, it hadn’t been aware it had an arm either, nor had any idea something that painful could have been done with one if it had.
Watanuki didn’t see a lot of variation in the basic expressions of the creatures that plagued him. With the exception of the very few friendly ones, mindless hunger was pretty well standard everywhere, and as a rule that didn’t generally change right up until the very last few seconds where they realised Doumeki’s bow meant business. He’d certainly never seen one look like it had just been caught trying to sneak out of the playground during lunchtime by the same teacher who’d warned it not half an hour before what would happen the next time it tried that.
“And what are you supposed to be then?” Susan asked it sternly. “It’s a bit bright for bogeymen.”
The creature spoke as if it hadn’t realised it had a voice up to now either. “A betobeto!” It shrieked.
“Pardon?”
“A betobeto ma’am!”
“Oh of course you are,” said Susan, making it clear that just because she’d never heard of one before didn’t mean she didn’t already know everything important there was to know about them. “I don’t know why people waste belief on the likes of you in these parts. Do you know what we do to things that go pattering around behind us for a cheap scare where I come from?”
“Noma’am!”
“If you’re out of here by the time I count to five, you won’t find out.” Susan let go of the arm, which vanished back into the betobeto as though it had never been there. “One.”
The sound of the spirit’s pattering feet became a rumble as it streaked off into the first direction that looked likely to take it to some decent cover.
Watanuki didn’t know whether to fall madly in love or run for his life. He found himself leaning rapidly towards the latter, however, when Susan turned back to him, her expression having lost practically none of its severity.
“You only encourage them, you know,” she said.
“What?!” Watanuki blurted in disbelief.
“Noticing monsters like that,” said Susan. “You’d be surprised how many of them are only in it for the attention.”
“I’m supposed to ignore the next thing that tries to eat me?”
“Have you tried it?”
“No! And you can tell because I haven’t been eaten yet!”
“But you always expect the worst from them. Surely you know how much creatures like those are influenced by what people say or believe.”
Watanuki was horrified to discover that Yuuko was not the only person in the universe with the nerve to start diagnosing his personal failings within minutes of having met him. “But I always do get the worst from them! What else am I supposed to expect?”
“There’s no need to make the problem worse for yourself. Look,” Susan added, and now sounded as if she was admitting something she was still not entirely thrilled about admitting to herself, “it’s not all bad, living with this other-than-normal stuff. It just takes a certain mindset to get on top of it some days. The poker helps too, I find,” she finished, without elaborating any further.
Not much was said for the rest of the trip. A few times Watanuki caught sight of a spirit coming around a corner up ahead, then suddenly coming up with a reason to go very quickly in the opposite direction. Even in Japan’s spirit world, news like Susan travelled fast.
It took another couple of minutes to reach the vacant lot, though still rather less time than Watanuki remembered it taking. He was a little irritated to realise that, contrary to Yuuko’s directions a week ago, Susan had found a shortcut that didn’t require them to go anywhere near Doumeki’s shrine. Outside the lot, Binky came obediently round to stand next to Susan. Mounting an unsaddled horse is no easy thing to do – especially when one is wearing an ankle-length skirt, but Susan seemed to find an invisible stirrup in mid air.
“Well, here we are then,” she said primly. “You’ll at least think about what I said, won’t you? And if it does turn out Yuuko knows what my grandfather’s been using in Binky’s place," she added, "please don’t ever tell me, I’m increasingly sure I don’t want to know.”
Watanuki decided he didn’t want to know either.
Susan turned the horse towards the far side of the lot and eased him into a trot. Binky did not so much disappear as somehow fade into the distance without ever reaching the other side. Watanuki firmly told the side of his brain that was sad to see him go to shut up, and turned to walk back to the shop.
In the lot behind him, there was a thump and then a sort of scuttling sound. Part of Watanuki realised he should have expected this, not that this made it any less disconcerting - after all, knowing what’s making the noise under the bed is often so much worse than wondering about it. Watanuki picked up his pace. The scuttling sound only got faster.
Watanuki thought about what Susan had said about expecting the worst, and decided it wasn’t his fault if he was always right.
He stopped in the middle of the footpath, just to make sure. The scuttling continued for a moment then stopped too. Fearing the worst, he turned to look behind him. There was no-one there. Watanuki looked down at ground level, just in case…
“Stop following me!” He screeched. The thing had the decency to look slightly sheepish, but not at all inclined to obey.
Watanuki gave up and headed back towards the shop, the scuttling following him the whole distance.
The luggage did eat two nasty looking spirits on the way back though, so Watanuki had to admit he didn’t really have very good grounds to complain.
So, some of you may remember I mentioned after the last part that there was still going to be one further short epilogue to this series. That's been increased to two further epilogues. Anyone surprised? ^^;;
ETA: Aaand posted! The first of the epilogues can be found here.
Title: A Death in the Family
Summary: Watanuki meets another member of the Death family. Susan is introduced to some lesser known Japanese spirits, and our hero is introduced to some novel ways of dealing with them.
Spoilers: Nothing important, though you'd probably want to read the previous parts of the series first.
There was a knock on the door to Yuuko’s shop. This was unusual, not just because there weren’t many parts of the door you could knock on without putting your fist right through the paper, but also because most of Yuuko’s customers found themselves in through the door before they knew what was happening. The woman who was there when Watanuki opened it, however, looked like she was determined to do this properly, regardless of whether anyone else noticed or not. She seemed normal, which was to say that there was an aggressive sort of normality about her that Watanuki probably wouldn’t have dared question even if there’d been tiny planets orbiting around her head. She didn’t look Japanese, but given that it was the end of the week, Watanuki was just prepared to be glad it wasn’t the skeleton in the cowl again.
He was yet to discover that, given the right circumstances, Susan was capable of being far the scarier of the two.
“My grandfather,” said the woman, “asked me to pick up Binky for him.” Something about the way she said ‘asked’ implied that the proper word would have been ‘sent’, except that she was not the sort of person who was ‘sent’ anywhere, least of all by the man in question.
“Aha?” said Watanuki vaguely. The word ‘grandfather’ in that sentence had fried the part of his brain that would otherwise have allowed him to come up with a more helpful response. Animated skeletons (cowled or otherwise) did not have descendents – it was very important to Watanuki’s little remaining sanity that nothing contradicted that. On the other hand, the shinigami had talked about someone called ‘Albert’ a lot, maybe this could be a relative of his?
It was probably fortunate that Yuuko chose this moment to do her appearing trick in the hall behind him and came to his rescue. “Of course. Binky is around the back of the shop. Maru, Moro, would you bring him around for us?” The girls ran off with twin cries of ‘horsey!’
The woman did not look satisfied. “Your shop keeps trying to convince me it’s not here,” she complained, making it very clear that no shop could possibly engage in more impolite behaviour.
“The shop is only visible to those who need its services,” Yuuko told her, in her usual authoritatively smug manner. “You don’t have any wishes you need granted, do you?”
The question went ignored. “My grandfather still can’t get in. How were you planning on sending Binky back once your week was up?” There was something odd about her voice that gave Watanuki the headache-inducing impression that she didn’t actually speak a word of Japanese, but was going to have words with anyone who dared misunderstand her.
“Oh, something was bound to come up,” Yuuko’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “And here you are! Can I offer you some tea?”
The sound of clopping hooves and girlish giggles meant that Maru and Moro had finished their task. “No thankyou,” said their guest curtly, “I should be on my way.”
“Very well. Why don’t you walk Susan back to the lot, Watanuki?”
Watanuki let out a sigh. “She probably doesn’t mean that as a suggestion,” he told… Susan, apparently, though he couldn’t remember any names being exchanged. He wasn’t especially keen on the idea. Quite apart from the fact that Susan gave the impression she was determined to be angry at someone and it might as well be him, an amorphous blob with feet had been following him around all morning. It couldn’t get into the shop, of course, but he knew it would be waiting for him the moment he stepped outside.
“If you must.” Susan replied, though at least this didn’t particularly seem to bother her, and turned towards the door. As they went past, she patted Binky on the nose in an absent sort of way. She didn’t take the halter, but Binky seemed to understand what was expected of him and followed her out. The ease of it all made Watanuki slightly jealous.
Once they were out on the street, Susan finally seemed to notice him properly and looked him up and down a few times. “You’d be some sort of part-time help to the witch then, I suppose.”
“More or less.” Though he had to admit the only ‘less’ part was whether or not this was entirely voluntary, and whether he was getting paid in any conventional sense.
“How on earth did you get my grandfather to lend you Binky?” Susan didn’t sound quite like she was holding him personally responsible, though still as though she knew he’d been involved and was fully convinced the whole mess could have been avoided if he’d just put in a little more effort. “He’s not something he rents out for children’s parties on weekends.”
“I don’t know, it was all Yuuko’s doing! I had nothing to do with it. Hardly anything!” Watanuki clarified, because Susan was not the sort of person you could get away with half truths with. “Look, I’m just the messenger, and I didn’t ask for even that.”
“Do you know what my grandfather has been using instead this past week?” Without giving him time to hazard a guess, she went on. “Neither do I, but every time I bring the subject up, Albert goes a colour I don’t think there’s a name for.”
The Albert Theory of Susan’s ancestry had just lost an awful lot of water. Worse still, the way she was talking about her grandfather as the owner of the horse had revived that other theory that Watanuki had been mentally denying he’d ever thought of. “Wait, you’re… you’re Death's granddaughter?!”
Susan sighed. “By adoption. Did you only just figure that out?”
“Yuuko doesn’t tell me these things!” Watanuki wailed. Although she probably would have, added a voice in his head, just to see you react like that.
“No, I suppose she wouldn’t, would she?” said Susan, though not unkindly.
They both fell silent for a bit. Over Watanuki and Susan’s footsteps and the clop of Binky’s hooves, it was a little difficult to make out the pattering of an extra set of feet, but…
Susan frowned. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, and turned around.
The next thing anyone knew, the thing with the pattering feet had had been pinned up against the nearest convenient wall. Somewhere in the middle of an amorphous blob with feet, Susan had managed to find an arm to pin behind its back. From the look on the thing’s… for lack of a better word – ‘face’, it hadn’t been aware it had an arm either, nor had any idea something that painful could have been done with one if it had.
Watanuki didn’t see a lot of variation in the basic expressions of the creatures that plagued him. With the exception of the very few friendly ones, mindless hunger was pretty well standard everywhere, and as a rule that didn’t generally change right up until the very last few seconds where they realised Doumeki’s bow meant business. He’d certainly never seen one look like it had just been caught trying to sneak out of the playground during lunchtime by the same teacher who’d warned it not half an hour before what would happen the next time it tried that.
“And what are you supposed to be then?” Susan asked it sternly. “It’s a bit bright for bogeymen.”
The creature spoke as if it hadn’t realised it had a voice up to now either. “A betobeto!” It shrieked.
“Pardon?”
“A betobeto ma’am!”
“Oh of course you are,” said Susan, making it clear that just because she’d never heard of one before didn’t mean she didn’t already know everything important there was to know about them. “I don’t know why people waste belief on the likes of you in these parts. Do you know what we do to things that go pattering around behind us for a cheap scare where I come from?”
“Noma’am!”
“If you’re out of here by the time I count to five, you won’t find out.” Susan let go of the arm, which vanished back into the betobeto as though it had never been there. “One.”
The sound of the spirit’s pattering feet became a rumble as it streaked off into the first direction that looked likely to take it to some decent cover.
Watanuki didn’t know whether to fall madly in love or run for his life. He found himself leaning rapidly towards the latter, however, when Susan turned back to him, her expression having lost practically none of its severity.
“You only encourage them, you know,” she said.
“What?!” Watanuki blurted in disbelief.
“Noticing monsters like that,” said Susan. “You’d be surprised how many of them are only in it for the attention.”
“I’m supposed to ignore the next thing that tries to eat me?”
“Have you tried it?”
“No! And you can tell because I haven’t been eaten yet!”
“But you always expect the worst from them. Surely you know how much creatures like those are influenced by what people say or believe.”
Watanuki was horrified to discover that Yuuko was not the only person in the universe with the nerve to start diagnosing his personal failings within minutes of having met him. “But I always do get the worst from them! What else am I supposed to expect?”
“There’s no need to make the problem worse for yourself. Look,” Susan added, and now sounded as if she was admitting something she was still not entirely thrilled about admitting to herself, “it’s not all bad, living with this other-than-normal stuff. It just takes a certain mindset to get on top of it some days. The poker helps too, I find,” she finished, without elaborating any further.
Not much was said for the rest of the trip. A few times Watanuki caught sight of a spirit coming around a corner up ahead, then suddenly coming up with a reason to go very quickly in the opposite direction. Even in Japan’s spirit world, news like Susan travelled fast.
It took another couple of minutes to reach the vacant lot, though still rather less time than Watanuki remembered it taking. He was a little irritated to realise that, contrary to Yuuko’s directions a week ago, Susan had found a shortcut that didn’t require them to go anywhere near Doumeki’s shrine. Outside the lot, Binky came obediently round to stand next to Susan. Mounting an unsaddled horse is no easy thing to do – especially when one is wearing an ankle-length skirt, but Susan seemed to find an invisible stirrup in mid air.
“Well, here we are then,” she said primly. “You’ll at least think about what I said, won’t you? And if it does turn out Yuuko knows what my grandfather’s been using in Binky’s place," she added, "please don’t ever tell me, I’m increasingly sure I don’t want to know.”
Watanuki decided he didn’t want to know either.
Susan turned the horse towards the far side of the lot and eased him into a trot. Binky did not so much disappear as somehow fade into the distance without ever reaching the other side. Watanuki firmly told the side of his brain that was sad to see him go to shut up, and turned to walk back to the shop.
In the lot behind him, there was a thump and then a sort of scuttling sound. Part of Watanuki realised he should have expected this, not that this made it any less disconcerting - after all, knowing what’s making the noise under the bed is often so much worse than wondering about it. Watanuki picked up his pace. The scuttling sound only got faster.
Watanuki thought about what Susan had said about expecting the worst, and decided it wasn’t his fault if he was always right.
He stopped in the middle of the footpath, just to make sure. The scuttling continued for a moment then stopped too. Fearing the worst, he turned to look behind him. There was no-one there. Watanuki looked down at ground level, just in case…
“Stop following me!” He screeched. The thing had the decency to look slightly sheepish, but not at all inclined to obey.
Watanuki gave up and headed back towards the shop, the scuttling following him the whole distance.
The luggage did eat two nasty looking spirits on the way back though, so Watanuki had to admit he didn’t really have very good grounds to complain.
So, some of you may remember I mentioned after the last part that there was still going to be one further short epilogue to this series. That's been increased to two further epilogues. Anyone surprised? ^^;;
ETA: Aaand posted! The first of the epilogues can be found here.