Words have power. The most dangerous things are words which have not been spoken, simply for fear of the amount of power that naming them could unleash, and the longer those words sit, silent, the more powerful they become.

Unspoken, they lie coiled and condensed, waiting. Yuuko has more dangerous words floating around in her head than her shop has relics. Watanuki knows this because on occasion she stops him mid-sentence with a slow, long look just lifted momentarily from whatever has caught her attention. She never says anything, and Watanuki always says too much, but there are some lines she is unwilling to have crossed.

Watanuki stamps and stomps and frets, chops furiously at vegetables and shouts that he emhates /emDoumeki for one reason for another.

Yuuko never disagrees or tries to argue that this is a half-truth. At those moments, Watanuki emdoes/em hate Doumeki. Passionately, intensely, but certainly not with every fibre of his being.

Lies aren't accepted in Yuuko's shop. They contaminate the air with thick, greasy curling-clouds that linger for days and slink into hiding-holes, of which the shop has many.

So Watanuki stops lying. He phrases everything in the present tense if he can help it, and rarely makes bald-faced statements about the future.

"Yes," Yuuko says, "Words are powerful, but there is more than one way to lie."