Fuji had been having strong dreams for years but he hadn't been able to remember them until recently. He was actually relieved when he started to remember them. After all, it was quite disorienting to wake up smiling or crying without understanding why. Fuji had been so frustrated that he had had his sister do regular tarot readings for him. These days, he went to his sister to have his fortune read out of habit because he didn't need his dreams predicted anymore. He knew what his dreams meant now.

Fuji's dreams were always different, but also always similar in that they contained the same person in each one. Fuji didn't know who he was but impossibly, inexplicably he loved him.

If someone told Fuji to recreate the person in mind on paper even as the prodigy he was he wouldn't have been able to. Fuji wasn't a bad hand at drawing but his dream person was so intense in his mind. He was a bright light that invoked so much love and want in Fuji that it scared him and he knew instinctively that he could never have caught all that emotion on simple paper. That person's image was warped by Fuji's intense emotions like light bending through smoke. No one as perfect as him could exist in real life.

Smooth pale skin, hair as dark as midnight, eyes like honey when filled with light, like burnt gold when saddened.

A smile, a smirk, a pout, a shy uncertain tilt, a frown, teeth bared in the fierce grin of a challenge, mouth thrown open in utter abandon….

Fuji had literally over a thousand images in his mind. They were snapshots caught in a tornado. One after another they flashed by and disappeared before Fuji could catch and relish them.

Fuji gave up on connecting the pieces to find the person outside of his dreams. It was all for the best, he thought. Being so fixated on a dream person would ensure only loneliness and regret and life was short. Fuji didn't want to waste his life pining for someone he would never meet awake.

So like that life continued with friends and family, school and tennis, and Fuji forgot about his dreams by day and remembered each night when he slipped into them once again. He fell in love again every night and woke up just a touch different every morning. Didn't books and movies affect one just the same though? The viewer would walk away with something new each time, leaving a piece of them behind.

Fuji didn't know what he had lost but sometimes he would feel so empty that he was sure that he had lost something to his dreams. Sometimes though when he walked to school in the morning his heart was swelled with love and contentment, and life tasted delicately sweet like the juice of a peach.

Fuji thought that he had fallen into one of his dreams the day Echizen Ryoma walked into his life because although he had never met him he had seen his face a thousand times before.

And Fuji fell in love all over again.

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AN: The soul mate of this story in song form: A Thousand Years by Christina Perri.