Yuma stopped dreaming.
It wasn't like he did it on purpose, he just…stopped having dreams. He fell asleep at night and woke up what felt like five minutes later after a night of black dreamlessness.
Maybe that was for the best. That way he couldn't dream about his parents, or Lua, or anything at all. He could just…disappear.
Disappearing was good sometimes. It felt sort of nice.
Maybe that was why his parents had disappeared.
Akari stopped dreaming.
She refused to sleep. Her eyes peeled wide by research and glowing screens and the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard—there was no time to sleep. She couldn't sleep. Not until her body collapsed underneath her and she succumbed to darkness for hours.
In that exhausted darkness, there were no dreams to be had.
Kaito stopped dreaming.
There was no time. No time to dwell on waking daydreams of dragonsong and strange dreams about dragons and galaxies—there was actual science here that he had to learn. Things he had to get the hang of, Number Hunting to learn and energy to channel and a dragon to find so that the Numbers could be hunted, a younger brother to take care of.
There was no time for dreams when Haruto needed him.
Yuma forgot.
His childhood drawings, pushed aside, gathered up by his grandmother's hands and tucked away into attic boxes. He didn't want to see them, and after a long time, they faded. Just another imaginary friend from another childhood, lost and forgotten as though it had never existed. Years take everything with them in the end.
Kaito forgot.
He forgot the song at the back of his head. It no longer came to comfort him. It was nothing more than a fantasy of his imagination, seeking some modicum of hope in a desperate situation. There was nothing more he could gain from such a childish thought. A memory lost to the abyss of the past.
He forgot that there were days that they had been happy, once. They seemed just as much a dream as the song.
Days, dreams, all of them lost.
Akari sat at her desk, the hovering holographic screens surrounding her, D-Gazer clipped over her eye, her gaze flickering from one screen to the next, fingers flying through pages and pages of information, occasionally dropping down to the desk to flip through sheets upon sheets of paper.
At edge of the desk, a carefully dusted portrait of her family smiled out at her. Clipped to the side of the frame was the tiny newspaper article: Adventurer Couple Declared Missing.
Tsukumo Akari did not forget.
She didn't have the luxury.