[xxxHOLiC Fic] Superheroes - Part 3
Feb. 3rd, 2008 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopRarely am I so happy to see CLAMP change their schedule - now we've got two holic chapters promised to us in the next three weeks! Let's hope they keep to it. ^_^
Anyway, while Kohane-related plot uncertainties keep me stalled on that big project, I've given in and turned out a third part of the Superhero!Watanuki AU, so here are links back to part 1 and part 2 for the story so far. Some odd little stats: part one was only came to 689 words, part two part two was 708. Part three, however, has clocked in at 3766. XD Yeah, that would be how this kind of story goes sometimes. Before anyone gets too excited, however, I don't think I'll be able to write anything more beyond this part without the whole thing morphing into something of Ghost Stories scale, and I'm really not up for trying another one of those right now kthx. However, if I was considering maybe throwing the universe open for a sort of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
libri_holic style thing, would anyone be interested? =D
Or maybe I should get on with posting part 3 before I get ahead of myself here. ^^;
Watanuki was so used to living under the general understanding that the whole world was out to get him that it wasn’t until he’d had to rescue Doumeki for the fourth time running that it dawned on him that it wasn’t just coincidence or just his own paranoia – the universe (or Doumeki, or both, which he privately felt more likely) really was out to get him this time. No-one had luck that bad.
His luck was only going to get worse though, because the one person he knew who had any hope of shedding any light on the mystery was Yuuko, who could be counted on to confuse issues as simple as making breakfast in the morning if she was allowed to talk about them long enough. Even after months of professional superheroing, Watanuki still wasn’t even clear on exactly what he was fighting thanks to his employer’s habit of changing her mind about whether they were aliens, angry ghosts, mutants, secret government experiments, extra-dimensional invaders or he didn’t know what else, based (as far as he could tell) purely on what game or manga series she was in the middle of at the time. The horrifying part was where her advice still turned out to be the crucial key to destroying them more often than not, regardless of what random source she’d attributed to the Monster of the Day, and it was all at the point where Watanuki would long ago have succumbed to his own elaborate conspiracy theories which cast Yuuko as the ringleader behind everything that had ever been wrong with his life if that wasn’t all far too blatantly obvious to actually be true. Any sane person in his position would surely have walked away from this job on their first day and left the whole deal to whichever supernatural branch of the government there must logically exist to take care of this sort of thing. Curse the overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility he’d been born with.
And just when he’d been starting to get into the groove of things, along came Doumeki, the least grateful rescue-ee the world had ever known.
“He keeps making me rescue him!” he complained to Yuuko.
“This would be that supervillain of yours again?” said Yuuko, holding her pipe out thoughtfully.
Yuuko had been informed about Doumeki back after the first rescue when Watanuki had burst into her shop wailing, “It’s over! My secret identity is lost! Aaaaahh!” and other complaints of that nature in between periods of complete incoherency.
“Oh dear, already?” Yuuko had replied. “Been getting careless with your powers in public, have you? I’m sure I did warn you where that could lead.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Watanuki protested. “It’s all because of him!”
“Him, hm?” Yuuko had been obviously far more fascinated than concerned by any of his troubles. “And who might that be? A rival superhero? A secret government agent?”
“This guy from school! I save his life and this is how he thanks me?”
“Mm?” said Yuuko, “And exactly how did he thank you?”
“By recognising me at school! Right out of the blue! I mean, he just looked at me and knew!”
“One glance was enough, you say?”
“What’s the point of even having a secret identity if people are going to do things like that?”
“Ah,” said Yuuko knowingly, drawing herself to her full height to better make her dramatic declaration. “Eyes that see the truth! A focus that effortlessly pierces even your disguise! Surely the sign of a destined connection between you.”
“I knew it!” Watanuki shrieked. “He really is a supervillain! That’s why he blackmailed me for my lunch!”
“Your lunch?” echoed Yuuko. “Oh, a certain sign of supervillainry, that one.”
Yuuko’s verbal arsenal didn’t often include sarcasm, so maybe Watanuki had some remote excuse if that remark had flown right over his head at the time. At any rate, he was too relieved now – some weeks after the original fact – that she’d been paying enough attention to remember the nefarious schoolboy he’d been dealing with that any other details about her reaction paled into irrelevance.
“Part of his evil plans, perhaps?” Yuuko suggested, meaning the rescuing incidents.
This made Watanuki pause. The supervillain theory of Doumeki’s behaviour was one he was reluctant to give up, even though he had to admit that the only evil thing he’d seen Doumeki do so far was irritate him – in a variety of creative ways, sure, but nothing that had interfered with any of his heroing, and surely any effective supervillain would need to be more subtle than that. “I don’t know, what kind of evil plans involve getting attacked by a monster?”
“Oh, the most devious kind!” Yuuko assured him. “Though also the kind that were never plans to begin with. These attacks, where did they happen?”
“There was the one on that big building near the station, the one on that other big building in the city, the one that nearly reached the school and the other one out near the river,” Watanuki recited. “And he acts like he doesn’t even believe there was anything there to attack him most of the time! Says he was just passing by and then I showed up and that was the first he knew, like it was all my fault and I was following him!”
“Perhaps he has been following you,” Yuuko smiled. “Do you think you have an admirer?”
The mere thought made Watanuki gag. “But he was always there first!”
“Then,” said Yuuko, riding a train of thought she knew was going to take her somewhere interesting, “could it be that your Doumeki is attracting those monsters himself?”
Watanuki had gotten as far as shrieking, “He really is a supervillain! How dare he make me rescue him whenever it goes wrong!” when Yuuko cut him off again.
“Oh, I don’t mean he’s attracting them deliberately. It would take an impossibly devious mind to devise a plan to hide his guilt by putting himself in danger with his own actions – you wouldn’t attribute that much genius to him, surely?”
Watanuki wasn’t entirely sure what Yuuko was getting at, but that would mean complimenting Doumeki’s intelligence, and he’d happily drop even accusations of villainy first. “Absolutely not.”
“Then the only remaining possibility is that he there is something about him beyond even his own control that attracts the monsters, hm?”
To his surprise, Watanuki realised that had been exactly the conclusion he’d been unable to put his finger on all day. “But…what? There’s never been anyone who’s done that before.”
“I wonder,” Yuuko mused. “I think it’s about time you brought this Doumeki to see me, don’t you?”
Something about the thought of introducing Yuuko and Doumeki made Watanuki’s blood run cold, but it was probably just paranoia. At least this would make them each other’s problems for a change.
***
Doumeki treated the news that Watanuki’s boss wanted to meet him with the same disinterest he treated just about everything that wasn’t likely to end with him getting to eat another of Watanuki’s lunches. After greeting them at the door with her usual enthusiasm (which would have constituted borderline sexual harassment if attempted by anyone with less style) she took Doumeki into the lounge and shooed Watanuki off to make some tea. This meant Watanuki was going to hear very little of what they might wind up talking about, and that worried him. He was sure a lot of the answer was going to be ‘you’.
Getting the kettle to boil seemed to take twice as long as it usually did that day. When he finally made it back in there, tray in hand, Yuuko turned from her guest to beam at him in the most discouraging of all possible ways. “Our mystery is solved, Watanuki! Your Doumeki is indeed the sad victim of a most unusual condition.”
“Meaning what?” asked Watanuki, wondering helplessly if he was ever going to make her stop with that ‘your Doumeki’ thing.
“Meaning it truly is his nature to attract those very monsters that it is your own destiny to defeat!” Yuuko declared, leaping to her feet for emphasis and forcing Watanuki to stumble a nervous pace backwards. “Henceforth, I do predict that any that should set foot in our fair city shall surely be driven to target him alone.”
“But… but… but why did they never go after him before?” Watanuki protested. “I never had to save him once until a month ago.” Doumeki himself looked neither victimised nor particularly saddened by her proclamation, which Watanuki could only take as a sign of extreme mental retardation.
“And why should it have happened before?” Yuuko boomed. “Were you aware of the great powers you possessed before my advice on that fateful day awakened them within you?”
“But this is even worse!” Watanuki protested. “Can’t we make him stop attracting them?”
“Can we make him stop?” Yuuko cried, ratcheting the dramatics up yet another notch (and had Watanuki seen a lightning and thunder crackling behind her he wouldn’t have been the least surprised). “Can you stop the wind from blowing or the sun from shining? Can you meet a long lost childhood friend when the sakura petals are falling in the spring and not fall deeply in love? Can you reject a destiny handed to you by the heavens themselves?”
Watanuki was sure the answer to at least one of those had to be ‘yes’ if there was any mercy in the world, but it would be hopeless to press the point.
“From this day, the very nature of your mission has changed!” Yuuko went on, her enthusiasm only rising with each new declaration. “Though your enemies may appear at any time, now you shall always know what it is they seek! To protect Doumeki is to protect the entire city!”
“What!?” said Watnauki, who had a feeling he knew where this was going but was determined to go on denying it as long as humanly possible.
“Watanuki!” Yuuko snapped at him, pointing a accusing finger mere inches away from his nose. “Have you not always complained that the enemy might appear any time, anywhere without your knowledge? Well, no longer! Now all you need do is to accompany Doumeki at all possible times, and surely the monsters will come to you!”
“WHAT!?” Watanuki shrieked. “Him!? But.. but he’s…!”
“He is to be in the gravest of danger on every occasion the invaders arrive,” Yuuko boomed. “Surely you would not abandon your sacred duty to protect the entire city for some personal disagreement?”
Oh, that just wasn’t playing fair. “No, but…” his gaze fell on Doumeki himself, who had been watching the proceedings with mild interest. “And what about you? Don’t you have anything to say about this?”
Doumeki shrugged. “Not particularly,” he said, and sipped his tea, immediately reminding Watanuki that there was still more wrong with this scenario than he’d even begun to cover.
“But how can I protect him? He doesn’t even realise when he’s in danger! He thinks the monsters don’t exist and everything else is my fault!”
“Oh?” said Yuuko.
“Can’t you at least explain it all to him so that he understands?” Watanuki pleaded.
Yuuko looked back at Doumeki, who still looked more like someone watching a movie than a boy who’d just heard his life was on the line and his would-be protector didn’t want to have to see his face.
“Perhaps there’s something I could do in that line,” she suggested, and Watanuki, who had run out of the imagination to think how this could possibly get worse, made the mistake of believing her.
***
If Yuuko herself wasn’t bad enough, Watanuki really should have taken the giant stack of comic books Doumeki was going through at lunch the following day as a warning. That and how much more interested the look Doumeki gave him when he sat down was than it ever had been before, but deliberately avoiding eye contact with someone often means you miss these things.
Doumeki reached for a recently discarded issue on the pile and flicked to a particular page. The cover (which Watanuki would later decide he ought to have paid more attention to) showed a muscle-bound superhero in a passionate, mid-air kiss with a beautiful woman. The muscles were in no way fair, he felt. Spandex looked good on people with muscles. On Watanuki, spandex just made people want to give him a sandwich.
“Ever done anything like this?” Doumeki asked, handing the issue over to Watanuki. The selected page showed Mr Muscle going flying out of a – something – which had just exploded, barely in the nick of time.
“No,” said Watanuki firmly. “And the longer I can go without doing anything like that, the happier I’ll be.”
“Oh,” said Doumeki, sounding vaguely disappointed.
“It’s not my fault if the monsters don’t blow things up! They just rampage around.” Watanuki felt inexplicably like he had something to prove.
Doumeki had already grabbed another of his comics, this time one with a man speaking into a watch on his wrist with flashing lights on it. “Own any of these?”
“Of course not, I don’t do gadgets, do I?” Watanuki protested, then in the interests of honesty, had to add, “and Yuuko’s never given me one.” He wasn’t ever admitting to the incident with the earmuffs if it killed him not to. “What are you doing with all those things anyway? You were never into comic books before this.”
“Your boss gave them to me. She seemed to think you wanted me to read them.”
Watanuki’s rapidly developing plans to murder Yuuko and bury her in a shallow grave were rudely interrupted when Doumeki shoved yet another issue under his nose. “What about this?”
“I don’t even have that superpower!”
“This?”
“I don’t fight mad scientists with superweapons either! Just monsters!”
“Why not?”
“The monsters keep me very busy, okay?”
“How about this?”
“How could that even happen? People around here can’t even see what I’m fighting, why would they bother cheering me on?”
“Hm.” Something in Doumeki’s expression suggested that it was a poor sort of superhero who couldn’t even get a bit of enthusiasm going from a crowd of onlookers. He reached for his pile of comics yet again.
For the first time ever, Watanuki found himself genuinely wishing something would attack the city right then, just to get himself out of the situation.
***
Something did attack the city later that afternoon, but by then lunchbreak was long over, and Watanuki’s helpless cries of “Couldn’t you have shown up earlier?” at the thing were rudely ignored.
***
Even if he didn’t live up to the standards of the comic book superheros, Doumeki had to admit Watanuki was relatively decent at what he did. It was a shame fulfilling his destined duties (or however Yuuko had put it) put him in such a bad mood. You’d think that dispatching a monster and pulling off a successful rescue would have given him some sort of sense of achievement, but instead, it just made him angry again.
“Can’t you try not attracting them?”
“How?” Doumeki frowned downwards and adjusted his grip on his rescuer a bit in a way that made Watanuki yelp at him in protest. What with his rubber-man invulnerability, Watanuki might not be bothered much by how high up they were where they’d landed, but Doumeki didn’t really want to have to be rescued from falling again today if he could help it.
“I don’t know, just turn it off! Hide in a box somewhere! Anything!”
“Have you tried not being a superhero?”
“Of course I’ve tried! The monsters kept coming anyway!”
“Funny that.”
“There must be something you can do! Have you even…”
Doumeki would later claim he’d kissed Watanuki at that point just to shut him up, though even he probably never believed a word of it.
***
It wasn’t unusual for Watanuki to come storming in to see Yuuko in utter fury, but this was pretty extreme even by usual standards. “You… you… THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!” he shrieked, pointing an arm at Yuuko, presumably to make sure she didn’t make the mistake of thinking the complaint was directed at one of the invisible other people who weren’t in the room.
“Hm?” said Yuuko.
“You gave him all those comic books! You gave him all those stupid ideas about heroing! Now he thinks that just because I’ve rescued him once or twice he’s supposed to fall in love with me! Why!?”
“Oh really,” Yuuko sounded fascinated. “Life or death battles, adrenalin-fuelled rescues just in the nick of time. Powers shared that entwine your destinies by the will of the fates themselves! Why, the budding of romance must be inevitable!”
“Does the part where I can’t stand the sight of him count for anything!? He doesn’t even appreciate being rescued! He doesn’t even get scared!”
Yuuko nodded knowingly. “It can be very difficult for men to find a way to express their gratitude. How good that he’s found…”
“He’s not grateful! He’s not in love with me either! It’s just a stupid idea he got from his stupid, stupid comics! Comics you gave to him!”
“Do you want me to have another word with him?” Yuuko offered, eyes sparkling with evil glee.
Watanuki opened his mouth and then shut it again. “No,” he declared firmly. “I am going to deal with this – myself – and don’t you dare do anything to make it worse!”
He tried very hard to slam the door on the way out, but the damn thing caught on the carpet and had to be disentangled before it would close at all, which completely ruined the effect.
***
Watanuki gave Doumeki a deliberately wide berth when he sat down for lunch the next day, not so much because he really expected Doumeki to try anything here in public, but it didn’t hurt to be certain, or to avoid sending any further messages that might get lost in translation. Doumeki watched him with the expression of someone vaguely expecting a show and wondering when it might begin. His stack of superhero comics was back – if anything, Watanuki thought it might have been larger than last time he’d seen it.
“You,” he declared, “have got to get rid of those things before they do any more damage.”
“I was rather enjoying them,” said Doumeki.
“But they’re giving you completely the wrong idea!” Watanuki protested. “Can’t you get this through your skull? Those are comics! Stories! What I do is real life! Real superheroing isn’t anything like what those tell you it is!”
Doumeki continued to stare at him blandly for a few seconds, then reached for his comic stack and fished out one of the more solid and serious looking issues. Wordlessly, he flicked through to a page and handed it over to Watanuki.
On it, one of those muscly superheros was having what looked like a Serious Argument with his girlfriend. Don’t you understand? he was saying. This job isn’t about heroics or glory or whatever you see on TV! The bad guys don’t just roll over and let me beat them. Real people can die if I make any mistake! They hate me for being a mutant freak as much as they…
“I think he said it better than you did,” said Doumeki, interrupting before Watanuki got any further. “They make out at the end of the scene,” he added helpfully.
Watanuki slammed the comic shut and practically threw it back at him. “That is completely not the point!” he shrieked. “The point is that me rescuing you now and then does not mean we are going to date! Why on earth do you keep trying to cast yourself as the girlfriend, anyway? You’re not even female!”
Doumeki shrugged. “They’re only comics. They don’t have to be exactly like real life.”
Watanuki had never wanted to throttle anyone so much in is entire life. He wanted to scream at Doumeki and never have to see his face again, but he was already doing the former and finding it supremely unsatisfying, and the latter would seriously damage his professional credibility.
“They aren’t like real life at all!” he insisted, despite his rapidly depleting case for the matter, and cast around desperately for the example he needed to prove himself right. “Like… in real life, you’re what’s attracting the monsters to the city! For all we know, it’s been you all along!”
“That’s possible,” Doumeki allowed.
“So then…” and here Watanuki was hitting on a point he’d been dancing around in his own head for several days but not quite found the courage to tackle head on, “if we just gave you to them, they’d all just go away, right? Wouldn’t they?”
“It’s a long shot,” said Doumeki thoughtfully.
“But it could be true!” Watanuki was getting on to a roll with this now. “And think – every time they show up, innocent people are in danger. They could even die! Wouldn’t it be more heroic of me to just hand you over and make just one sacrifice if it saved other lives?”
“So you’re saying I should martyr myself for the good of the city?”
“I’m saying you wouldn’t have to! I could hand you over myself! That’s even better than comic book heroics – it’s taking responsibility and making the tough decision for the greater good. Would any of your comic book superheros do that?”
“No,” said Doumeki, looking him straight in the eye. “But are you going to?”
Watanuki swallowed uncomfortably and wilted internally under his gaze. “Of course not, I don’t even know if it would work yet! It’s just an example, but the point is, I could do it, and for all you know, maybe I would!”
“It isn’t about what you could do,” said Doumeki. “It’s about what you do. That was in one of the issues too…”
“How can you be… be so calm about this!” Watanuki screeched at him, trying desperately to ignore how badly his whole approach was backfiring. “I just told you that you’re the one who’s causing all this trouble in the first place! Don’t you care?”
“I’m not attracting them deliberately.”
“But it’s still because of you! Because you’re here, thousands of innocent people might be in danger. Aren’t you even going to angst about that or something?”
“Ah,” said Doumeki. “That’s what they do in the comics, isn’t it?” and Watanuki wanted to crawl into a small hole and never come back out again.
Random: You know, I'm pretty sure someone sent me a design for a Superhero!Watanuki costume at some stage, but I seem to have lost it. >.>
Anyway, while Kohane-related plot uncertainties keep me stalled on that big project, I've given in and turned out a third part of the Superhero!Watanuki AU, so here are links back to part 1 and part 2 for the story so far. Some odd little stats: part one was only came to 689 words, part two part two was 708. Part three, however, has clocked in at 3766. XD Yeah, that would be how this kind of story goes sometimes. Before anyone gets too excited, however, I don't think I'll be able to write anything more beyond this part without the whole thing morphing into something of Ghost Stories scale, and I'm really not up for trying another one of those right now kthx. However, if I was considering maybe throwing the universe open for a sort of
libri_holic style thing, would anyone be interested? =DOr maybe I should get on with posting part 3 before I get ahead of myself here. ^^;
Watanuki was so used to living under the general understanding that the whole world was out to get him that it wasn’t until he’d had to rescue Doumeki for the fourth time running that it dawned on him that it wasn’t just coincidence or just his own paranoia – the universe (or Doumeki, or both, which he privately felt more likely) really was out to get him this time. No-one had luck that bad.
His luck was only going to get worse though, because the one person he knew who had any hope of shedding any light on the mystery was Yuuko, who could be counted on to confuse issues as simple as making breakfast in the morning if she was allowed to talk about them long enough. Even after months of professional superheroing, Watanuki still wasn’t even clear on exactly what he was fighting thanks to his employer’s habit of changing her mind about whether they were aliens, angry ghosts, mutants, secret government experiments, extra-dimensional invaders or he didn’t know what else, based (as far as he could tell) purely on what game or manga series she was in the middle of at the time. The horrifying part was where her advice still turned out to be the crucial key to destroying them more often than not, regardless of what random source she’d attributed to the Monster of the Day, and it was all at the point where Watanuki would long ago have succumbed to his own elaborate conspiracy theories which cast Yuuko as the ringleader behind everything that had ever been wrong with his life if that wasn’t all far too blatantly obvious to actually be true. Any sane person in his position would surely have walked away from this job on their first day and left the whole deal to whichever supernatural branch of the government there must logically exist to take care of this sort of thing. Curse the overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility he’d been born with.
And just when he’d been starting to get into the groove of things, along came Doumeki, the least grateful rescue-ee the world had ever known.
“He keeps making me rescue him!” he complained to Yuuko.
“This would be that supervillain of yours again?” said Yuuko, holding her pipe out thoughtfully.
Yuuko had been informed about Doumeki back after the first rescue when Watanuki had burst into her shop wailing, “It’s over! My secret identity is lost! Aaaaahh!” and other complaints of that nature in between periods of complete incoherency.
“Oh dear, already?” Yuuko had replied. “Been getting careless with your powers in public, have you? I’m sure I did warn you where that could lead.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Watanuki protested. “It’s all because of him!”
“Him, hm?” Yuuko had been obviously far more fascinated than concerned by any of his troubles. “And who might that be? A rival superhero? A secret government agent?”
“This guy from school! I save his life and this is how he thanks me?”
“Mm?” said Yuuko, “And exactly how did he thank you?”
“By recognising me at school! Right out of the blue! I mean, he just looked at me and knew!”
“One glance was enough, you say?”
“What’s the point of even having a secret identity if people are going to do things like that?”
“Ah,” said Yuuko knowingly, drawing herself to her full height to better make her dramatic declaration. “Eyes that see the truth! A focus that effortlessly pierces even your disguise! Surely the sign of a destined connection between you.”
“I knew it!” Watanuki shrieked. “He really is a supervillain! That’s why he blackmailed me for my lunch!”
“Your lunch?” echoed Yuuko. “Oh, a certain sign of supervillainry, that one.”
Yuuko’s verbal arsenal didn’t often include sarcasm, so maybe Watanuki had some remote excuse if that remark had flown right over his head at the time. At any rate, he was too relieved now – some weeks after the original fact – that she’d been paying enough attention to remember the nefarious schoolboy he’d been dealing with that any other details about her reaction paled into irrelevance.
“Part of his evil plans, perhaps?” Yuuko suggested, meaning the rescuing incidents.
This made Watanuki pause. The supervillain theory of Doumeki’s behaviour was one he was reluctant to give up, even though he had to admit that the only evil thing he’d seen Doumeki do so far was irritate him – in a variety of creative ways, sure, but nothing that had interfered with any of his heroing, and surely any effective supervillain would need to be more subtle than that. “I don’t know, what kind of evil plans involve getting attacked by a monster?”
“Oh, the most devious kind!” Yuuko assured him. “Though also the kind that were never plans to begin with. These attacks, where did they happen?”
“There was the one on that big building near the station, the one on that other big building in the city, the one that nearly reached the school and the other one out near the river,” Watanuki recited. “And he acts like he doesn’t even believe there was anything there to attack him most of the time! Says he was just passing by and then I showed up and that was the first he knew, like it was all my fault and I was following him!”
“Perhaps he has been following you,” Yuuko smiled. “Do you think you have an admirer?”
The mere thought made Watanuki gag. “But he was always there first!”
“Then,” said Yuuko, riding a train of thought she knew was going to take her somewhere interesting, “could it be that your Doumeki is attracting those monsters himself?”
Watanuki had gotten as far as shrieking, “He really is a supervillain! How dare he make me rescue him whenever it goes wrong!” when Yuuko cut him off again.
“Oh, I don’t mean he’s attracting them deliberately. It would take an impossibly devious mind to devise a plan to hide his guilt by putting himself in danger with his own actions – you wouldn’t attribute that much genius to him, surely?”
Watanuki wasn’t entirely sure what Yuuko was getting at, but that would mean complimenting Doumeki’s intelligence, and he’d happily drop even accusations of villainy first. “Absolutely not.”
“Then the only remaining possibility is that he there is something about him beyond even his own control that attracts the monsters, hm?”
To his surprise, Watanuki realised that had been exactly the conclusion he’d been unable to put his finger on all day. “But…what? There’s never been anyone who’s done that before.”
“I wonder,” Yuuko mused. “I think it’s about time you brought this Doumeki to see me, don’t you?”
Something about the thought of introducing Yuuko and Doumeki made Watanuki’s blood run cold, but it was probably just paranoia. At least this would make them each other’s problems for a change.
***
Doumeki treated the news that Watanuki’s boss wanted to meet him with the same disinterest he treated just about everything that wasn’t likely to end with him getting to eat another of Watanuki’s lunches. After greeting them at the door with her usual enthusiasm (which would have constituted borderline sexual harassment if attempted by anyone with less style) she took Doumeki into the lounge and shooed Watanuki off to make some tea. This meant Watanuki was going to hear very little of what they might wind up talking about, and that worried him. He was sure a lot of the answer was going to be ‘you’.
Getting the kettle to boil seemed to take twice as long as it usually did that day. When he finally made it back in there, tray in hand, Yuuko turned from her guest to beam at him in the most discouraging of all possible ways. “Our mystery is solved, Watanuki! Your Doumeki is indeed the sad victim of a most unusual condition.”
“Meaning what?” asked Watanuki, wondering helplessly if he was ever going to make her stop with that ‘your Doumeki’ thing.
“Meaning it truly is his nature to attract those very monsters that it is your own destiny to defeat!” Yuuko declared, leaping to her feet for emphasis and forcing Watanuki to stumble a nervous pace backwards. “Henceforth, I do predict that any that should set foot in our fair city shall surely be driven to target him alone.”
“But… but… but why did they never go after him before?” Watanuki protested. “I never had to save him once until a month ago.” Doumeki himself looked neither victimised nor particularly saddened by her proclamation, which Watanuki could only take as a sign of extreme mental retardation.
“And why should it have happened before?” Yuuko boomed. “Were you aware of the great powers you possessed before my advice on that fateful day awakened them within you?”
“But this is even worse!” Watanuki protested. “Can’t we make him stop attracting them?”
“Can we make him stop?” Yuuko cried, ratcheting the dramatics up yet another notch (and had Watanuki seen a lightning and thunder crackling behind her he wouldn’t have been the least surprised). “Can you stop the wind from blowing or the sun from shining? Can you meet a long lost childhood friend when the sakura petals are falling in the spring and not fall deeply in love? Can you reject a destiny handed to you by the heavens themselves?”
Watanuki was sure the answer to at least one of those had to be ‘yes’ if there was any mercy in the world, but it would be hopeless to press the point.
“From this day, the very nature of your mission has changed!” Yuuko went on, her enthusiasm only rising with each new declaration. “Though your enemies may appear at any time, now you shall always know what it is they seek! To protect Doumeki is to protect the entire city!”
“What!?” said Watnauki, who had a feeling he knew where this was going but was determined to go on denying it as long as humanly possible.
“Watanuki!” Yuuko snapped at him, pointing a accusing finger mere inches away from his nose. “Have you not always complained that the enemy might appear any time, anywhere without your knowledge? Well, no longer! Now all you need do is to accompany Doumeki at all possible times, and surely the monsters will come to you!”
“WHAT!?” Watanuki shrieked. “Him!? But.. but he’s…!”
“He is to be in the gravest of danger on every occasion the invaders arrive,” Yuuko boomed. “Surely you would not abandon your sacred duty to protect the entire city for some personal disagreement?”
Oh, that just wasn’t playing fair. “No, but…” his gaze fell on Doumeki himself, who had been watching the proceedings with mild interest. “And what about you? Don’t you have anything to say about this?”
Doumeki shrugged. “Not particularly,” he said, and sipped his tea, immediately reminding Watanuki that there was still more wrong with this scenario than he’d even begun to cover.
“But how can I protect him? He doesn’t even realise when he’s in danger! He thinks the monsters don’t exist and everything else is my fault!”
“Oh?” said Yuuko.
“Can’t you at least explain it all to him so that he understands?” Watanuki pleaded.
Yuuko looked back at Doumeki, who still looked more like someone watching a movie than a boy who’d just heard his life was on the line and his would-be protector didn’t want to have to see his face.
“Perhaps there’s something I could do in that line,” she suggested, and Watanuki, who had run out of the imagination to think how this could possibly get worse, made the mistake of believing her.
***
If Yuuko herself wasn’t bad enough, Watanuki really should have taken the giant stack of comic books Doumeki was going through at lunch the following day as a warning. That and how much more interested the look Doumeki gave him when he sat down was than it ever had been before, but deliberately avoiding eye contact with someone often means you miss these things.
Doumeki reached for a recently discarded issue on the pile and flicked to a particular page. The cover (which Watanuki would later decide he ought to have paid more attention to) showed a muscle-bound superhero in a passionate, mid-air kiss with a beautiful woman. The muscles were in no way fair, he felt. Spandex looked good on people with muscles. On Watanuki, spandex just made people want to give him a sandwich.
“Ever done anything like this?” Doumeki asked, handing the issue over to Watanuki. The selected page showed Mr Muscle going flying out of a – something – which had just exploded, barely in the nick of time.
“No,” said Watanuki firmly. “And the longer I can go without doing anything like that, the happier I’ll be.”
“Oh,” said Doumeki, sounding vaguely disappointed.
“It’s not my fault if the monsters don’t blow things up! They just rampage around.” Watanuki felt inexplicably like he had something to prove.
Doumeki had already grabbed another of his comics, this time one with a man speaking into a watch on his wrist with flashing lights on it. “Own any of these?”
“Of course not, I don’t do gadgets, do I?” Watanuki protested, then in the interests of honesty, had to add, “and Yuuko’s never given me one.” He wasn’t ever admitting to the incident with the earmuffs if it killed him not to. “What are you doing with all those things anyway? You were never into comic books before this.”
“Your boss gave them to me. She seemed to think you wanted me to read them.”
Watanuki’s rapidly developing plans to murder Yuuko and bury her in a shallow grave were rudely interrupted when Doumeki shoved yet another issue under his nose. “What about this?”
“I don’t even have that superpower!”
“This?”
“I don’t fight mad scientists with superweapons either! Just monsters!”
“Why not?”
“The monsters keep me very busy, okay?”
“How about this?”
“How could that even happen? People around here can’t even see what I’m fighting, why would they bother cheering me on?”
“Hm.” Something in Doumeki’s expression suggested that it was a poor sort of superhero who couldn’t even get a bit of enthusiasm going from a crowd of onlookers. He reached for his pile of comics yet again.
For the first time ever, Watanuki found himself genuinely wishing something would attack the city right then, just to get himself out of the situation.
***
Something did attack the city later that afternoon, but by then lunchbreak was long over, and Watanuki’s helpless cries of “Couldn’t you have shown up earlier?” at the thing were rudely ignored.
***
Even if he didn’t live up to the standards of the comic book superheros, Doumeki had to admit Watanuki was relatively decent at what he did. It was a shame fulfilling his destined duties (or however Yuuko had put it) put him in such a bad mood. You’d think that dispatching a monster and pulling off a successful rescue would have given him some sort of sense of achievement, but instead, it just made him angry again.
“Can’t you try not attracting them?”
“How?” Doumeki frowned downwards and adjusted his grip on his rescuer a bit in a way that made Watanuki yelp at him in protest. What with his rubber-man invulnerability, Watanuki might not be bothered much by how high up they were where they’d landed, but Doumeki didn’t really want to have to be rescued from falling again today if he could help it.
“I don’t know, just turn it off! Hide in a box somewhere! Anything!”
“Have you tried not being a superhero?”
“Of course I’ve tried! The monsters kept coming anyway!”
“Funny that.”
“There must be something you can do! Have you even…”
Doumeki would later claim he’d kissed Watanuki at that point just to shut him up, though even he probably never believed a word of it.
***
It wasn’t unusual for Watanuki to come storming in to see Yuuko in utter fury, but this was pretty extreme even by usual standards. “You… you… THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!” he shrieked, pointing an arm at Yuuko, presumably to make sure she didn’t make the mistake of thinking the complaint was directed at one of the invisible other people who weren’t in the room.
“Hm?” said Yuuko.
“You gave him all those comic books! You gave him all those stupid ideas about heroing! Now he thinks that just because I’ve rescued him once or twice he’s supposed to fall in love with me! Why!?”
“Oh really,” Yuuko sounded fascinated. “Life or death battles, adrenalin-fuelled rescues just in the nick of time. Powers shared that entwine your destinies by the will of the fates themselves! Why, the budding of romance must be inevitable!”
“Does the part where I can’t stand the sight of him count for anything!? He doesn’t even appreciate being rescued! He doesn’t even get scared!”
Yuuko nodded knowingly. “It can be very difficult for men to find a way to express their gratitude. How good that he’s found…”
“He’s not grateful! He’s not in love with me either! It’s just a stupid idea he got from his stupid, stupid comics! Comics you gave to him!”
“Do you want me to have another word with him?” Yuuko offered, eyes sparkling with evil glee.
Watanuki opened his mouth and then shut it again. “No,” he declared firmly. “I am going to deal with this – myself – and don’t you dare do anything to make it worse!”
He tried very hard to slam the door on the way out, but the damn thing caught on the carpet and had to be disentangled before it would close at all, which completely ruined the effect.
***
Watanuki gave Doumeki a deliberately wide berth when he sat down for lunch the next day, not so much because he really expected Doumeki to try anything here in public, but it didn’t hurt to be certain, or to avoid sending any further messages that might get lost in translation. Doumeki watched him with the expression of someone vaguely expecting a show and wondering when it might begin. His stack of superhero comics was back – if anything, Watanuki thought it might have been larger than last time he’d seen it.
“You,” he declared, “have got to get rid of those things before they do any more damage.”
“I was rather enjoying them,” said Doumeki.
“But they’re giving you completely the wrong idea!” Watanuki protested. “Can’t you get this through your skull? Those are comics! Stories! What I do is real life! Real superheroing isn’t anything like what those tell you it is!”
Doumeki continued to stare at him blandly for a few seconds, then reached for his comic stack and fished out one of the more solid and serious looking issues. Wordlessly, he flicked through to a page and handed it over to Watanuki.
On it, one of those muscly superheros was having what looked like a Serious Argument with his girlfriend. Don’t you understand? he was saying. This job isn’t about heroics or glory or whatever you see on TV! The bad guys don’t just roll over and let me beat them. Real people can die if I make any mistake! They hate me for being a mutant freak as much as they…
“I think he said it better than you did,” said Doumeki, interrupting before Watanuki got any further. “They make out at the end of the scene,” he added helpfully.
Watanuki slammed the comic shut and practically threw it back at him. “That is completely not the point!” he shrieked. “The point is that me rescuing you now and then does not mean we are going to date! Why on earth do you keep trying to cast yourself as the girlfriend, anyway? You’re not even female!”
Doumeki shrugged. “They’re only comics. They don’t have to be exactly like real life.”
Watanuki had never wanted to throttle anyone so much in is entire life. He wanted to scream at Doumeki and never have to see his face again, but he was already doing the former and finding it supremely unsatisfying, and the latter would seriously damage his professional credibility.
“They aren’t like real life at all!” he insisted, despite his rapidly depleting case for the matter, and cast around desperately for the example he needed to prove himself right. “Like… in real life, you’re what’s attracting the monsters to the city! For all we know, it’s been you all along!”
“That’s possible,” Doumeki allowed.
“So then…” and here Watanuki was hitting on a point he’d been dancing around in his own head for several days but not quite found the courage to tackle head on, “if we just gave you to them, they’d all just go away, right? Wouldn’t they?”
“It’s a long shot,” said Doumeki thoughtfully.
“But it could be true!” Watanuki was getting on to a roll with this now. “And think – every time they show up, innocent people are in danger. They could even die! Wouldn’t it be more heroic of me to just hand you over and make just one sacrifice if it saved other lives?”
“So you’re saying I should martyr myself for the good of the city?”
“I’m saying you wouldn’t have to! I could hand you over myself! That’s even better than comic book heroics – it’s taking responsibility and making the tough decision for the greater good. Would any of your comic book superheros do that?”
“No,” said Doumeki, looking him straight in the eye. “But are you going to?”
Watanuki swallowed uncomfortably and wilted internally under his gaze. “Of course not, I don’t even know if it would work yet! It’s just an example, but the point is, I could do it, and for all you know, maybe I would!”
“It isn’t about what you could do,” said Doumeki. “It’s about what you do. That was in one of the issues too…”
“How can you be… be so calm about this!” Watanuki screeched at him, trying desperately to ignore how badly his whole approach was backfiring. “I just told you that you’re the one who’s causing all this trouble in the first place! Don’t you care?”
“I’m not attracting them deliberately.”
“But it’s still because of you! Because you’re here, thousands of innocent people might be in danger. Aren’t you even going to angst about that or something?”
“Ah,” said Doumeki. “That’s what they do in the comics, isn’t it?” and Watanuki wanted to crawl into a small hole and never come back out again.
Random: You know, I'm pretty sure someone sent me a design for a Superhero!Watanuki costume at some stage, but I seem to have lost it. >.>
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Date: 2008-02-06 04:18 am (UTC)... And other 'doki' stuff. Glad to read this, as always. (*Adds to memories*)
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Date: 2008-02-07 11:25 pm (UTC)