By all the eagle in thee, all the dove (Watanuki gen)

[storypaint]

Title: By all the eagle in thee, all the dove
Fandom: xxxHOLiC
Length: 2305 words
Prompt: 31_days: 9 Oct 09 // wandering birds pass through the village
Pairing: Watanuki and Yuuko gen; Clow/Yuuko implied
Other: This is a fantasy-type AU in which Clow is the king of some not-Clow country, and Yuuko is a traveling shopkeeper with her irritable assistant Watanuki. Also featuring Doumeki the stone-faced knight. Fic dedicated to chibidl because this is her AU I'm playing in. Title from a poem by Richard Crashaw.

Excerpt: For a wagon that looked as old and as odd as it was, it traveled very smoothly, and for the first few days as Watanuki recovered, he felt as though he were on the sea, rocking back and forth.

For a wagon that looked as old and as odd as it was, it traveled very smoothly, and for the first few days as Watanuki recovered, he felt as though he were on the sea, rocking back and forth.

On the fourth day, he opened his eyes and watched the hanging baskets swing on their hooks. He was in a wagon, he realized then, not the roiling waves. He studied the baskets, both amazed and appalled by the great variety of junk they seemed to hold, trinkets and toys, dirty or clean, and there was a great deal of other merchandise piled around him haphazardly, hemming him into his small bed.

He didn't know whose wagon this was. He didn't know--

He didn't know his own name.

He thought about that for a while.

*

On occasion, over the years he spent as Yuuko's servant, he remembered things. Or perhaps he dreamed them. He wasn't sure what the difference was. He couldn't remember his past, could barely recall his own name (or, at least, the name the witch claimed was his).

Sometimes, though, he'd get flashes. When the wagon slowed to a stop and the witch pulled the curtain and looked in on him, she brought with her a smell of lilac, stale alcohol, and smoke.

My father smokes a different kind of tobacco, he thought, and then, Father? I don't remember--

Yuuko (though he hadn't know her name, not then) smiled at him, and said, "So you're awake. Wonderful! We have a customer."

"What?" he began to protest, feeling a sort of helpless rage rise in him at her blatant disregard for whatever problem had put him in such a state in the back of her wagon.

"Are you deaf now, Watanuki?" she answered, reaching above his head into one of the baskets, and ignoring his protests when it came down on top of him a moment later. She slipped back through the curtain again.

*

The first dove arrived a week after Watanuki woke up. Yuuko laughed when it fluttered down to perch on the wagon frame.

"I'm not surprised," she said cryptically, and then, "catch it." Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and the request made him feel rather put-upon. He tried to protest, but then he saw the little silver message tube attached to the bird's leg.

"Someone's sent you a message?" he said.

"The first of many, no doubt," she answered.

It took Watanuki twenty minutes to coax the bird with crumbs of bread (Weren't they supposed to be trained? he thought irritably). Yuuko plucked the message from his fingertips, unfurled the small page, and scanned it, her eyes narrowing with irritation as she did.

"What is it?"

"It's just--" and she glanced at him, "someone else being an idiot, that's all."

But she was humming a bit when they packed to leave camp that morning. Whoever it was she argued with, they argued by dove very slowly, bird by bird, as they passed through towns and Yuuko granted wishes, her assistant (Servant, Watanuki thought) at her side.

He became used to bird-catching, used to the rolling motion of the wagon, used to Yuuko, even, though he wouldn't admit to any of these things. He was jumpy and irritable and constantly complaining. Though she'd answered a couple of questions when he asked her about his lost past, he still knew almost nothing.

And so three years passed.

*

"Who am I?" he asked, the day he woke.

"Couldn't you have chosen less-cliched opening lines?" she answered, relaxing back against the hammock.

"What in the world does that mean?" he answered angrily.

They were camped in a small grove not far from the place where Yuuko had granted a wish, whatever that meant, and Watanuki was attempting to make something from the ridiculously low food supplies she carried. He would have liked it if the wisher had paid her in something useful, like pasta, instead of another dirty trinket.

He was a little surprised that he remembered how to cook, but something about it was automatic. She explained to him once, much later, about the two types of memory, and she had looked far-away when she said, "You learned how to cook from your father. He insisted on it." But that had been then.

"Your name," she said, taking a pipe from the folds of her skirt, somehow, and following with a packet of tobacco (or perhaps something stronger, he'd thought, even then), "is Kimihiro Watanuki, and you are my assistant. You had a terrible knock to the head. Obviously you've lost your memory."

"Then why were you making fun of me?" he complained.

She smiled. "It's fun to do!" she answered.

He couldn't get much more out of her: her name, the fact that he had a father, somewhere, but that traveling with her was the best idea at the moment. From other travelers he learned about the country they traveled through: war-torn, weary, wishing. King Clow was locked in perpetual battle with the invading army of King Fei Wong. The heir to the throne had disappeared or died, no one knew, after a particularly nasty assassination attempt.

"Unrest," Yuuko said to him, when he tried to ask her about it, "and ungranted wishes."

She dragged on her pipe and blew the smoke out into the night sky, letting it swirl into the dimness.

*

Nothing that Watanuki did for Yuuko was easy, not even cooking. She was forever requesting dishes requiring food that was out of season. And the doves, trained or not, never came easily to his hand. Not only that, but every mission she sent him on nearly got him killed.

About four months after he had resigned himself to her difficult service, he found himself between a rock and a hard place, the hard place being an angry dragon who hadn't appreciated him stumbling over her eggs, even if he hadn't broken any of them, and the rock being a large bluff he had his back pressed to, as if that could prevent a flaming death. He flailed around, trying to keep out of her range, but then an arrow flew down, nicking his ear but still somehow managing to strike the dragon in her weak spot. And suddenly he was trapped under three hundred pounds of dying lizard, his ear bleeding, and he protested being crushed to death.

"You're too loud," someone said to him, kicking the dragon off his flailing body. The speaker towered over him, armor gleaming, face grim.

"TOO LOUD?!" Watanuki yelled. "I was just nearly killed by a dragon, and then by some IDIOT with a bow--"

The stern-faced person lifted the bow at his side. "Next time I'll let it eat you."

Watanuki scrambled to his feet. "Thank you," he said begrudgingly before stomping away through the underbrush.

Somehow, he wasn't entirely surprised when the knight showed up for dinner.

"Don't you have a wife?" he demanded grumpily, stirring the soup. The knight, who had introduced himself to Yuuko as Doumeki, nodded.

"She's not here," he said.

Watanuki rolled his eyes. That much was obvious. But Yuuko was pulling a full bottle of liquor out of the wagon (one he hadn't seen while cleaning yesterday, somehow), and after that, it just got worse.

*

After three years of travel, Yuuko turned the wagon toward the capital. Somehow in all their meanderings, they'd never been there, and Watanuki was looking forward to it. The war was making the country dangerous, certainly, but he'd heard amazing things about the city.

And in any case, Doumeki the knight was still following them, his horse as placid-faced as he was. All attempts to get him to choose a different path had failed. Apparently he lived near the capital.

Two days before their projected arrival, Yuuko received a dove messenger that seemed to upset her far more than any of the others had. She wasn't one for showing it when she was sad, but she stroked the bird and placed it in a cage, instead of returning it right that evening.

The next morning, Watanuki began to hear the rumors from travelers headed the other direction. Yuuko had drank heavily the night before and had left him to get them moving that day. She was hiding in the wagon from her hangover.

"The king is dead," the travelers were saying. "Assassinated." After a while, the trickle of people started to look like refugees. Yuuko emerged from her heavy sleep when they began to turn onto the smooth roads leading into the city. When Watanuki told her the news, she just nodded.

"Then there are wishes to grant in this city," she said softly.

The streets were wide and cobbled and filled with people who stared at Doumeki on his horse and Yuuko's wagon, when they bothered to lift their eyes from the daily business of life. Watanuki took it all in with wide eyes.

"Business first!" Yuuko said cheerfully, pulling up short on one of the broad avenues. She darted back into the wagon and came back with the dove, which had a new message fastened to its leg. Watanuki considered it warily, but she put the cage into his hand. She then followed it with a small cloth bag, which he discovered contained all of the possessions he had acquired in the past few years.

"What are you doing?" he asked, looking down into the bag and feeling rather lost. She just smiled.

"Releasing you from service!" she answered cheerfully. "That is what you wanted, right? Just deliver this dove for me, as a last task."

"Where?" he asked, still bewildered.

"The gates of the palace," she answered, waving a hand as though it were simple. "Just show the guards and they'll see you in."

"You were writing to the king?"

"No, I was writing to an idiot," she answered, and you can deliver this to the new idiot."

"Yuuko--"

Before he could protest any further, she nudged him down out of the wagon and turned the horses around, driving away without a look back. After a moment, Watanuki heard the stamp of hooves on cobbles, as Doumeki's horse shifted position. The knight looked down at Watanuki.

"You're not going with her?" he asked despairingly, beginning to tread toward the palace gates.

"Whose watch is that?" Doumeki answered, pointing. Watanuki looked down into his bag again and saw a glint of gold. He pulled it free.

"This can't be mine. Yuuko is going to be mad at me for taking it, I'll owe her more work--"

"Open it," Doumeki said.

Watanuki sighed. "I'll get in trouble for it," he tried, but Doumeki didn't seem discouraged, so he sighed again, louder in case it hadn't registered the first time, and flicked open the clasp.

It was a pocketwatch, yes, but on the other side there was a portrait, done very carefully to fit, of a tall dark-haired woman, a taller dark-haired man, and a little boy who bore more than a passing resemblance to Watanuki. As for the woman, her hand resting on the child's shoulder, she could be no other than Yuuko; she was wearing a dress he'd seen her wear before. The man was familiar too, but he couldn't quite place him until he pulled a coin from his pocket and stared. There it was, on the front side of the cent piece-- the king's face.

"Me?" he sputtered, looking down at the watch and then back up at Doumeki. "Me? And she--"

"Looks like it," Doumeki answered placidly. His horse shifted under him again and he got down, looking around for a hitching post. "We should go deliver the bird."

"I don't care about the bird," Watanuki returned acidly, though he hadn't managed to drop the cage.

"Your mother does," the knight pointed out. Watanuki shivered. He had a flash of memory, of a cool hand on a fevered brow, and then a flash of annoyance. Why hadn't she told him? Why had she just treated him like her assistant?

Someone with what seemed to be their worldly possessions on their back stumbled past them. Watanuki remembered all of the rumors he'd heard while they were traveling, the unrest in the capital, the assassination attempts--

Someone had tried to kill him three years ago. That's why he'd hurt his head and couldn't remember anything.

Someone had killed his father, the king. He'd heard it just a couple of days ago. Watanuki felt a pang of loss for the tall, smiling man in the portrait. He was little better than a stranger, but perhaps they could have gotten to know each other again.

He shut the watch carefully and tucked it into his pocket. Moving a little unsteadily, he strode up to the gates and knocked, holding up the birdcage like a beacon.

And as Yuuko had said, the doors opened without question. In fact, the guard's eyes widened in shock and he pelted back into the palace, calling a name that Watanuki vaguely recognized as that of the former king's chief advisor.

Watanuki stood there awkwardly next to Doumeki. After a moment, the knight stepped through the now-unattended gate and started walking toward the palace door.

"Hey, what are you doing? You can't just go in there!"

Doumeki shrugged. "I don't know why not, if this is your place."

"That's why you can't go in!" Watanuki protested. "I don't want you to."

He grinned with his newfound power but quickly deflated when Doumeki didn't pause. He hurried after him, still holding the dove cage, though after a moment he paused and reached through the bars. For once, the bird didn't fight when he removed the capsule from his leg.

Clef, the page said in Yuuko's scrawl, here you go. Good luck.

Watanuki scowled and stomped after Doumeki. Maybe now that he was prince he could get people to give him some answers.

Maybe.