A/N: Hey! This is my first voyage into the world of writing fanfiction. I saw a different level to N and Touko/White/Hilda's interactions and I hope I captured them honestly. All comments and critiques are appreciated and very welcome!
Last night, again, he was in her dreams.
This was not a fevered reality or a half-realized fantasy, like the dreams that had come before it. No, this was more an accumulation of everything she needed to hear, and none of what she wanted. He was standing there, literally the embodiment of light. He was barely there against the blinding environment of the dream. It was almost as if the shapeless white cloak he was wearing had taken the time to consume his form from the neck down before bleeding into the background.
Was this the product of a Munna? It all felt so real, she was too… aware for it to be natural. He asked her, his voice floating in the air, if she remembered when he touched her for the first time. She paused—what was the first time? It happened, in reality, only once, but her mind meshed it with her fantasies, denying her the luxury of honesty with herself.
Oh, she could remember her fantasies…
The spark, the life in his fingers brushed along her back, and his lips heated each patch of skin he placed them against. His breath was careful and shallow against her, as if controlling his breathing would contain everything else going on between them. It was invasive, it was fantastic, and… none of it was real. The breath of reality gusted through her fantasies with the horrible weight of anti-climax when he touched her, honestly and sexually touched her.
When his fingers glided cautiously along her arm… she felt skin, and blood and bone beneath that skin. There was no electric current stabbing through his limbs, and even if there was, her body did not give a reaction. When he kissed her, carefully, longingly, she felt small warm breaths of air and lips pressed against her cheek. She felt exactly what was happening, and it bored her.
And after that night of difficulty and need, she woke up and felt nothing more than a deep soreness in her abdomen, and a terribly honest realization: the two of them were an embodiment, possibly a legend of the world he had wanted to grasp so frantically. Two worlds-black and white, truth and honesty, reality and hope-forever in limbo and conflict with each other. The only other way harmony could be achieved at this point was for both of them to be destroyed. Meshing was impossible, she realized after their attempt. It created gray neutrality, frustration and lack of progress. She wanted to love him, to feel a reaction, an excitement, a deep need both carnal and mental, but it never came. He was lovely and intelligent, and certainly inspiring in his idealism, but for her that was all he was.
Coming out of her coma of thoughts she looked at his dream equivalent. Her mouth opened, but before words could escape waking air hit her both gently and ferociously, in a way that waking up only could. And suddenly White was looking at her ceiling, lightly washed in the light of a sunrise. She turned her head over along her pillow and saw a missed message on her cross-transceiver. It blinked and trembled with its message when she picked it up blearily between her fingers. It was from N. He wanted to battle, his message told her. His face was the same, if a little older and much more... aware. His hair was shorter and his eyes were still that clear, conscious blue-green.
A battle. For old time's sake. White didn't see the harm in reinforcing their standing. It would be nice to see his current face, and maybe she wouldn't be so haunted by the one from a few years ago, when he told her he loved her and she couldn't say the same.
Maybe, this time, if he said he loved her, she would tell him that last night, again, he was in her dreams.