Katsu woke from the nightmare, but not in the normal way. He didn't bolt upright, didn't scream, didn't break out into a cold sweat. A normal person would have been hard pressed to tell if he was even awake at all. But his eyes shined out in the dark with all the horror he would never express in any other way.
Eventually, he did sit up, though slowly and deliberately, careful not to wake Shinomiri Aoshi, who must have came in after Katsu already fell asleep.
He hadn't had a dream like that in … how long? Forever, it seemed. Forever – or about three years. There was probably a reason for that, but Katsu preferred to avoid thinking about that whenever possible. He'd gotten quite good at it actually – hadn't hid mother always said practice made perfect? His mother had said a lot of things, hadn't she?
No. that wasn't something he liked to think about either.
For Katsu, his life began with Sagara-taichou. Nothing before or after that mattered – well, not until Sano. Sano had made him remember what it was like to care. Not to care about anything specifically, just caring in general. Caring whether or not the food was good and not just edible, whether or not he was truly wretched or just mildly uncomfortable. Caring whether or not he would – could? – get up in the morning, something that had been increasingly difficult for Katsu in the years before Sano came, again, for reasons he rather not think on overmuch.
Sometimes he still felt as if he couldn't decide to be grateful to Sano for that or not.
But he was getting sidetracked. The dream. It hadn't frightened him, not at all. If anything, it had … comforted him. And that terrified him. Even now, when he thought back to the dream, rapidly losing details and clarity now that he was awake, it didn't disturb him at all – though he could easily see where it would upset someone else.
What had it been about again?
Katsu frowned, trying to grasp at the images that he could have sworn were burned in his brain a few moments ago. There had been … wings … and feathers and … snow … other things, too. What was so disturbing about that again?
Katsu snorted softly, and shook his head, muttering softly. "Fucking crazy, Katsu, that's what you are. Stark, raving insane." He sighed, made one last attempt to remember what had worried him so much about that dream, and lay back down to go to sleep.
In the morning, he couldn't even remember he had woken up, much less dreamed anything at all.
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And here's today's chapter, posted not more than a few hours after "yesterday's." heheh. I had planned on catching up on … that … one day I missed (can't remember when it was – know I'm missing one, though) today to, but ended up not. Oh, well. There's always tomorrow.
And you know what they say – tomorrow never comes!
One more thing. It has recently come to my attention that, aside from a few vague hints, this thing has developed nothing whatsoever in the way of a plot. I didn't really mean to take this long with the exposition and all, but that's just the way it worked out. What'cha'gonna do? (shit nothing, that's what!) I promise, plot will develop sometime in the near future, but also a) when it does, it will be a slow-moving plot (I try, but there's only so much you can do with a page a day, ya know?) and b) it will probably resemble the actual manga/anime in that there will not be one unifying story arc that lasts the entire story, but a lot (or only a couple) of comparatively smaller arcs all bound by the same generalities.
If that's a huge disappointment to a lot of you, I give you this challenge: you write a story that is updated in some form every day, for an as-yet-unknown-but-considerable-amount-of-time and you see how long you can go with just one plot before you want to kill yourself. Trust me, you will end up writing side arcs and little not-really-one-shots that fit into the general storyline, or else you will commit bloody, messy suicide. And you won't leave a note. (I know because I actually tried to write out one solid plot for this – on paper, it is not published online and never will be – and you wanna know how long it lasted before I just couldn't force myself to write anymore? A week. Not even a calendar week, mind you, but a work-week, Monday to Friday. And that killed.)