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Doumeki couldn’t dissuade Watanuki from inheriting the shop, he didn’t know what words to use or even where to begin lecturing about interpersonal relationships before the deed was done, all tied up in a red ribbon before he’d even stepped foot in the room. He understood that his friend was grieving, that he had lost the most important person in his life, but Watanuki should have known or been made to understand that while Yuuko was his most important person, he was Doumeki’s most important person. Since that first meeting, really. Sometimes he could be so thick. All this time of Doumeki saving him and refusing to let him suffer alone, and how had Watanuki repaid him? By alienating himself from the people who loved him, by trying to fill the hole in his heart instead of letting it heal naturally, by refusing to let anyone help in all but the most trivial of matters, and of course by breaking Doumeki’s heart.
The years came and went and Doumeki majored in folklore in some vain hope that he could drag Watanuki back into his own world, the world that Doumeki inhabited, the world where there was a Watanuki-sized hole in Doumeki’s eyesight. He hated the way his old friend had gotten quiet and thoughtful in all the wrong ways. That idiot had grown somber and careless at the same time and nothing irritated Doumeki more than seeing him callously throw himself into the business of wish-fulfillment without a second thought for his own wellbeing. Watanuki had always ignored how him being hurt in turn hurt the people who cared about him. Doumeki had thought he’d learned that lesson of self-worth back when they were all in high school, but then again, this was the person who had also idiotically accepted the shop without considering all the people he would hurt. He hadn’t even tried to haggle.
Some days when he got back to his empty house from a long day of school and an even longer evening of watching the shell of the person he loved laze around in drooping kimonos, Doumeki would wonder to himself which was worse. Whether it would hurt more for Watanuki to have not even considered his friends’ and Doumeki’s feelings, or for him to have considered them and deemed Yuuko more important than them. It never failed to enrage Doumeki that Watanuki fit so seamlessly into the world of spirits and wishes that Yuuko had left him to inherit. His now-ageless friend looked far too beautiful in those horrible kimonos that woman had left for him, as if he had been made to wear them, as if all of Doumeki’s feelings were in vain because Watanuki was right there, but he was so agonizingly far away. Doumeki could reach out and touch him, but his fingers would never reach, his words had long ago stopped ringing in those ears, his figure had blurred in those eyes years ago, even though one of them was his.
There was nothing more painful for Doumeki than looking at Watanuki, but he was unable to leave or even close his eyes for long. He quietly finished college and quietly took over the shrine and pretended it wasn’t so he could stay close to the shopkeeper; make sure he wasn’t getting into any undue trouble.
Watanuki gave him a ring and it hurt so bad he wanted to laugh. It feelt like such a joke, when it turned into a bow, because nothing Watanuki ever did was simply for his or Doumeki’s sake. He purified many things with that bow on the shopkeeper’s request, without a second thought, because it was the shopkeeper who asked it of him. Both of them knew, but neither commented, that Doumeki would do anything the shopkeeper asked of him. Every time he entered the store, he was greeted with a “welcome home”, and it always hurt. Whenever Watanuki smiled at him, it hurt, the smoke from his pipe hurt, the ring around Doumeki’s index finger never stopped burning and his heart never stopped aching. It was worse because Watanuki knew, that bastard, he had to know. He had to know Doumeki loved him, wanted to have Watanuki all to himself, to steal him away from the shop and the spirit world. He had to know or Doumeki would go crazy.
Years and years and years and years passed in the same way, with Doumeki taking quiet care of the shop and the shopkeeper. He married, if only to make sure there was always a Doumeki to take care of that reckless shopkeeper and drink all of his sake. And then even more years passed and before he knew it, Doumeki Shizuka was an old man, and as an old man, he still loved the ageless boy in charge of the shop. And then as an old man on his death bed, he decided to wait in death for the boy he loved, and passed on as he had lived his life. Quietly.