Doumeki knows that what Watanuki wants is something that he can't give. Perhaps this is why he recoils once again from the scene, where Watanuki asks with his eyes and not words (never words, because even though he's grown to become sage and wise, he's still Watanuki beneath it all, and must retain his pride). But, after all, what Doumeki wants is also something that Watanuki can't give, so he contends to himself that his actions are fair.

Doumeki wants to wrap himself around Watanuki, to clutch him safely to his chest and whisk him away from this surreality that is heavy, and grey, and thick with abstrusity. What he wants is for Watanuki to grant him permission to save him from consuming himself. But these are fools' wishes. He knows that what Watanuki wants from him is to be pressed up against a wall and devoured. And knows, too, that if he would go to the ends of the earth and back for Doumeki, then he would have given his life for Yuuko. Is giving his life for Yuuko.

Doumeki loves him in the way he loves her, and he thinks that this must be where he has gone wrong. Because if he loved Watanuki in the way Watanuki does him, then there would be a name for this horridly heavy, desperate ache in his lungs and he wouldn't have felt so alone.

But Watanuki keeps asking, in his wordless way, and because he's never been good at rooting himself in the adverse, perhaps someday Doumeki will give in. There is, after all, only so long one can put up an obtuse front before it begins to give way. And as the rays of the next morning's sun creep in to wake them, perhaps then Doumeki will truly realize what it is he's had, and lost.