a/n: blurbs something out.


gone are the days

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There's a scent of sea in his dreams, and it invades his senses — his mind — until the salty, too-harsh-on-tongue taste is everything he knows of the world his subconsciousness had offered to him.

It's a dream because this place — this beach — is unknown, unfamiliar to him; these days, he hasn't dared to venture away from things and places he knows. Adventures, he has learned, are awful things that steal a lot that is you — it happened to him once.

Thinking about it made him weary.

The wind breezed by him; tickling his neck, swaying his collar, sending shivers down his spine as he trudged forward with legs that didn't want to keep going.

His bare feet shuffled in the thin, glimmering sand that looked deceivingly soft and clear until he stepped on one sharp-edged rock. A pained groan preceded the string of curses that left his lips.

"Shou-chan."

It's a whisper carried by the wind, or perhaps his memories; either way, it startles him and pulls him back into this moment of this misplaced dream. That voice, musical as always, makes his blood freeze in his veins — or perhaps, it melts the solid organ in his chest that has ached for—

"Byakuran-san," he breathes out as his eyes sweep the landscape, the long sand beach that meets the sea and never separates.

There's something achingly painful in that — the sea, the beach, and then there's Byakuran and him, who could not be farther from being the sea and the beach even if they tried to.

He tries to find Byakuran. He can't see him, and it worries him to the point of anxious stomachache that prickles at every pore of his soul — or what's left of it, he supposes with appropriate bitterness that refuses to fade.

He still can't see him, even as he runs down to the beach, low enough for his feet to touch the salty, warm water that glimmers with the afternoon sun.

"Byakuran-san." The name fits his lips, his tongue, his… everything, so perfectly that it makes him want to hurl, even in this placid, serene dream.

He never does find Byakuran in this dream.

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He's awake, but not really.

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In another dream, he's still in Melone Base, with white walls and excruciating stomachaches and responsibility no human should ever have to bear.

He still has those rose-haired women supervising his every movement, every action, and from the corner of his eye, he can always see one security camera — he knows Byakuran-san is looking at him, he just doesn't know when Byakuran-san does it. Maybe that's part of the game; keeping Shouichi on his toes seems to be something the leader of Millefiore finds quite amusing.

But this dream is not about—

"Shou-chan," Byakuran-san's voice calls out to him, and he's properly startled when he turns to his personal laptop and sees a familiar face that is thousands of miles away from him (as it ought to be, he sometimes muses with a fear wringing at his heart).

But a dream is a dream, and dreamed terror—

"Byakuran-san," he murmurs as he leans the screen further away from him to see Byakuran-san better. "What's the occasion?"

—well, it's just as real as the terror that he has lived through.

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Sometimes he dreams of happier times: of Byakuran-san's brighter-than-sun attitude, of chess games, of Choice.

A few scattered memories of their trips to cafes also slip into his dream world, and when he awakens, he swears he almost feels the heat of a cup of hot chocolate still in his hands.

That's all he really has left — the almost-feelings, the past without a future and without a present.

And when he closes his eyes to dream again, he just wishes — rather pathetically — that this would be a good dream.

(He just wants to see Byakuran-san smile like the world is worth it once more.)