Chapter Text
“Dreams are not a curse,” Kawata-san, a middle-aged woman with bright, intelligent eyes looking kindly at him behind horn-rimmed glasses and light brown hair neatly arranged in a bun tells him in her sophisticated, yet soothing, voice in the fifth session of his dream therapy.
The sessions have been arranged and paid for by Akashi (as a belated apology for the scissor incident that happened when the two first met), who learned from Kuroko (who had, in turn, learned from Aomine, because Kagami had refused to tell Kuroko himself and get him involved with the curse ) that Kagami was in need of some counseling regarding his dreams, and if there was someone proficient in the field he could recommend.
Kagami agreed to go to therapy without any fuss since it was the least he could do to make up for what he had put Aomine through all this time, even if Aomine insisted that the idea of the therapy was also his penance for how shitty he had treated Kagami. At first, he thought it was a waste of his time and Akashi’s money, because Kawata-san, with all her impressive educational background and numerous achievements adorning the pale blue wall behind her, did not believe in the Yumenoroi curse. But she was patient with him, listening carefully and with much interest to Kagami’s side of the story, and by the time she told him ‘Dreams are a healing process,’ he was more willing to listen to her side of the story than he was a few weeks ago.
“Based on what you’ve told me in the past few sessions, it is obvious that your mother loved you. Why would she give her son, whom she loved so dearly, a curse of all things?”
It’s a reasonable question. One that Kagami had asked himself so many times before he finally gave up on ever finding a reasonable answer to it and just accepted it as something that is, independent of any need for logical explanations.
She doesn’t press the question upon seeing Kagami’s conflicted face; instead, she asks him something else.
“When was the first time she talked to you about the curse? Do you remember?”
He does, despite all his efforts not to. He wasn’t able to say a word about his mother until the third session; now though, he doesn’t find it as impossible a task as before. There is such a peaceful lilt to Kawata-san’s voice that like hypnosis, almost lulls Kagami into opening up about all of his deep-seated, badly-stitched-up psychological scars without any fear of bleeding out. He trusts her to help stitch him back up if his wounds started to bleed too much.
“Yeah. When mom’s health began to get worse and she started her treatment, spending more time at the hospital than she did at home, I...I began having these...dreams. Awful dreams, about losing her. Waking up next to her and finding her...dead. I’d wake up crying and screaming and clinging desperately to her, and she’d ask me about the dream but I couldn’t say a word. I was so scared that talking about it would make it real. So, when the dreams didn’t stop, mom told me about the curse. That if I had a dream about someone special to me and didn’t tell them what the dream was about, something bad could happen to them.”
Kawata-san nods her head in understanding. She never interrupts him even if he talks for half an hour non-stop. It’s...nice. Being able to talk so much after having kept it bottled up for so long and not being judged or ridiculed for it is nice.
“Did you start telling your mom about your dreams, then?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”
“And after you finished talking about the dream, what would she do?”
For some reason, it’s not as painful or difficult as it was in the first few sessions to remember and talk about his most repressed memories. He wonders if this new development means that the therapy is working. “She...uhh...she’d wrap her arms around me and press me to her chest and tell me she wasn’t going anywhere. That she’d never leave me. That there was nothing to be scared about because she’d always be here with me.”
“How did you feel after that?”
That’s...that’s an odd question, because Kagami has never really given it any thought before. But Kawata-san is waiting for his answer, ever so patiently, so Kagami tries to recall his feelings from many years ago. “I...I felt...I felt good. Relieved. Safe. I was a child and I didn’t know my mom’s condition would only get worse, so when she promised me that she’d never leave me, I believed her.”
The middle-aged woman is giving him a kind, encouraging smile, and Kagami starts to feel less like a fool for having believed that his mother would never leave him. “Do you see it, now, Taiga? Why your mother would tell you that story about the curse?”
Kagami tries to retrace Kawata-san’s questions and his answers to them. “Because...because she wanted me to talk about my dreams?”
The smile on Kawata-san’s face deepens and her bright hazel eyes begin to sparkle, looking at that moment like a proud teacher praising her prodigy student. Kagami had never had any teacher look at him with that proud expression.
“Yes. Your mother was worried about you. You were having these anxiety dreams and you couldn’t talk about it, and she didn’t know how else to make you open up, so she made up that story. It was effective, yes, but it wasn’t without its harms.”
Kagami keeps quiet, his mind in overdrive at the words and the implications that seem so obvious and logical he wonders why he didn’t think about it like that before.
“Taiga, take it from someone who’s dedicated all her life to dreams: Dreams are not a curse. They are a reflection of your subconscious thoughts, of your worries and anxieties and fears. All your subconscious needs is a little trigger from the outside world, an image, a wayward thought, a lingering smell or taste, to delve deep into the innermost layers of your psyche. Our mind likes to exaggerate, to blow up the reflections out of proportions because that’s how it entertains itself while we’re asleep, and also because it can, so why limit itself? The more imaginative we train our minds to be, the more colorful and exaggerated our dreams will be. Think of it as special effects in the movies. The more budget you have at your expense, the more professional artists and technicians to do the job, the more realistic, and if it’s for a horror movie, the more terrifying the special effects will be. Your dreams are not a curse, Taiga. They’re just a movie. If there’s any meaning to them, it’s an exaggerated portrayal of your emotional and mental state. Sometimes, their whole purpose is to entertain your brain while you’re asleep. You don’t have to be afraid of your dreams. They can’t hurt anyone, and you have to stop allowing them to hurt you.”
At the end of the tenth session when his therapist tells him, “neither you nor your dreams were at fault for your mother’s death,” Kagami feels he’s ready to finally accept that his dreams are just dreams, like everyone else’s, and that the Yumenoroi curse wasn’t the reason why he lost his mom because it doesn’t exist.
***
He was nine when his mother died. That in itself would have been a truly traumatic experience for any child, but for Taiga, who blamed himself for his mother’s death, it was even more harrowing and impossible to reconcile with. His nightmares got worse, to the point where he would sometimes refuse to sleep, because this time, his mother was no longer there to hold him in her arms and lie to him in her sweet, soothing voice that everything was going to be alright. He was a mess and his father was in despair. Upon suggestions from sympathetic coworkers, he took his son to a child psychologist, but Taiga couldn’t talk. The wound was still fresh and the pain was too close to the surface and it choked him every time he opened his mouth to say he wanted his mom. After several sessions of therapy that led to no concrete results, with Taiga still having nightmares and being unable to say a word, his psychologist finally suggested a change of scenery. She told his father that Taiga was young and children forgot easily if they stopped being constantly exposed to visual triggers. His father, already at his wits’ end, didn’t take much convincing. He asked for a transfer, which landed him quite a lucrative job in the US. Taiga didn’t want to go. His mother was in Tokyo. But he was only a nine-year-old child and he couldn’t live on his own and make his own decisions. For a whole year after they moved to the US, everything was just worse. Taiga struggled with the language despite having a competent and patient private teacher, and his oddly-colored eyes and oddly-shaped eyebrows and the inability to communicate set him apart from his peers. He was labeled as the foreign kid with funny eyebrows and scary eyes, and he got bullied and roughened up on a regular basis but soon learned when to dodge and how to throw a punch to minimize the number of bruises and scrapes he went home with. It wasn’t until he met Tatsuya and through him, learned how to play basketball and make friends, that things started to get a little more tolerable.
Still, no matter how much progress Taiga made throughout the year, drowning himself in school activities and street basketball and unsupervised adventures with Tatsuya far outside the safe, upscale neighborhood he lived in, he was still a complete mess on the anniversary of his mother’s death. The only thing that could console him on that terrible, tragic day that seemed to be on an endless loop was to be near his mom, so his father started taking Taiga back on a week-long trip to Tokyo to visit his mother’s grave and feel more physically close to her.
When Taiga reached 16, he mustered up the courage and the determination to tell his father he wanted to move back to Japan and live there permanently. His father was strongly opposed to the idea, of course. His business was booming and he wasn’t sure how his son would cope with being constantly close to the root of his trauma on his own, even though the wound was as old as seven years by now and Taiga looked stable and confident and it had been some three years since he had an episode. But Taiga had a way of wearing him down with his constant badgering, and he had become quite skilled in shoving the signs deep under his skin so no one could see even the faint outline of them.
He moved back to Japan on his own. His father, despite what Kagami later told others, had never been part of the homecoming plan. And the only times the father and son reunited and got to see each other in person was on this special, terrible day: his mom’s death anniversary.
Kagami Hiroya, standing almost two meters tall with broad shoulders and a hard-set jaw, clad in a form-fitting, designer suit, cuts an imposing figure in Kagami’s modestly-decorated living room. His dark hair is meticulously slicked back and the square, full rim glasses perched on top of a long, straight nose over sharp, red eyes give him a professional, no-nonsense look. Still, there is an unmistakable warmth in his eyes and a gentle curve to his mouth as he puts his small suitcase down to give his son a proper hug.
“Dad, I’m glad you made it,” Kagami says with honesty as he leans back to take a look at his father’s face that people said looked almost identical to his own, despite the lack of thick, split eyebrows and the different shape of their mouths. They keep video calling every month or so, making sure the other is taking proper care of himself living on his own, but seeing his father in person feels totally different.
“You look good,” he comments with a happy smile and is a little startled when his father gently grabs him by the chin and turns his face from side to side.
“And you look even better, Taiga. Better than I’ve ever seen you, in fact,” he says in a soft tone, always extra gentle with him when even slightly alluding to Kagami’s traumatic past, and Kagami easily hears the words that he does not say. Today is the day his mother passed away eight years ago and every year Kagami looks a mess on this particular day, but right now he can’t stop smiling and he knows his eyes must be shining and free of the usual dark bags under them because he actually managed to get a good night’s sleep last night, and he has to thank Kawata-san for them, and one other person in particular.
“That’s because I feel better, dad.” Kagami motions for his father to take a seat on the couch. It has been a long flight and Hiroya looks slightly jetlagged under his stoic and commanding expression.
“I’ve been seeing a therapist.” Kagami drops the bomb with a sheepish look on his face.
As he expected, his father looks genuinely surprised. “Oh?”
Kagami has always been difficult with therapists, always throwing a tantrum and refusing to see one, saying he didn’t need therapy because he was doing fine. It had given his father much pain until Hiroya stopped forcing him to do what he didn’t want to do. Taiga has always been like that. Stubborn and assertive and fiercely independent, sometimes much to his father’s chagrin.
“A very good one; one of the best in her field, which is dream therapy.”
Hiroya frowns at that. “I didn’t know you were still having trouble with your dreams.”
Kagami looks away, a soft blush of guilt tinting his cheeks. Obviously, he never told his dad anything about the Yumenoroi curse, afraid that the curse would be passed on to him. The thought now makes him want to laugh. He had been so fucking silly all this time, so superstitious, believing in curses and shit. Kawata-san had reassured him that it had nothing to do with stupidity. His case wasn’t one that could have simply gone away if he had forced it through the sheer power of rationality. She told him he had been traumatized, and the wound had been left unattended for too long and he needed outside, professional help to have it treated. Still, Kagami doesn’t mind laughing at himself and at his fears that all sound so silly right now. It makes him feel better, so why not?
“Well, they only started to get bothersome again a few months back. A friend of mine, Akashi Seijuurou, the Rakuzan captain I told you about, he suggested I go see her, and it really helped. Kawata-san told me lots of interesting stuff about dreams and she helped me finally accept the fact that I had nothing to do with mom’s death --”
“Oh, Taiga,” his father reaches out and grabs Kagami’s hand, a look of concern, sympathy and warm affection on his face.
Kagami smiles down at his father, always grateful for his support and patience all these years. “I’m alright, dad. I’ve finally reconciled with mom’s death. It took me too long to address it, I thought if I ignored it long enough it’d go away, but I was wrong and I got help and I feel so much better now.”
“Taiga, you have no idea how relieved hearing that makes me feel. You have always been so strong and I’m really proud of you, son. ”
Kagami wets his lips, suddenly feeling a little nervous about what he is going to reveal next. “Thanks, dad. Ah, there’s something else, too. Something besides the therapy that made me feel better.”
His father gives him a curious look, but his eyes are sharp and he can already guess what Kagam is hinting at.
“I met someone. I mean, I’ve known him for a while but we just got together, you know, romantically, and he’s been really supportive and he helped me a lot and I...I really love him, dad.”
Hiroya gives him an encouraging smile. “Who’s the lucky guy, then? Someone I know?”
Kagami smiles back and nods, no longer feeling nervous. It wasn’t that he had thought his father would chastise him or judge him for his sexual preferences. It’s because he’s dating someone for the first time and it’s a big deal given his history and issues, and he doesn't want anything to go wrong now that he has allowed himself to be vulnerable again. Plus, Aomine is important to him in a way no one has ever been, and he wants his dad to accept and like him the way Honomi-san has accepted and liked Kagami.
He turns his head to the side, looking toward the direction of his bedroom.
“Aomine? You can come out now.”
Hiroya gets to his feet as the blue-haired boy approaches him slowly, hesitantly. He looks nervous and shy, which Hiroya finds adorable considering he’s almost as tall as him.
The boy extends a hand toward him western-style and Hiroya shakes it without any hesitation.
“Aomine Daiki, sir. I’m...Kagami and I are,” he coughs, clearly embarrassed. “We’re dating.”
“Oh, so I can finally put a face to the name. Taiga has told me a lot about your basketball skills.”
Kagami grins widely at that and drapes an arm around Aomine’s shoulder. The slightly taller boy is startled at the sudden gesture but soon relaxes in Kagami’s hold.
“His basketball is the best, dad. You gotta watch us play while you’re here. It’s even more entertaining and intense than those NBA matches we watched together.”
Aomine smirks at his grinning boyfriend. Seeing Kagami this genuinely happy makes him feel lightheaded and so terribly warm inside. “Full of ourselves, are we?”
Kagami turns his head and kisses his cheek with lips still stretched in a smile and Aomine splutters. He sneaks a glance at Kagami’s father and finds him looking at them with a warm, supportive expression on his face.
“You boys take good care of each other, alright?”
“Sure, dad,” “Yes, sir,” the two boys say at the same time and as Kagami starts laughing in that free, uplifting, contagious way of his, Aomine returns the kiss on his warm, blushing cheek and feels like the happiest man on Earth.
***
Say you’ve never seen/ something so beautiful/ I am your dream
Tell me I’m everything you’ll ever need/ I’m for you - Archive
“I had a dream of you.”
The spot on the mattress next to him dips as Aomine moves closer to him, draping a bare, dark-skinned arm over Kagami’s similarly bare chest, and groaning in a sleep-affected husky voice into his ear, “Yeah? What was it about?”
Kagami shifts around to lie on his side, letting out a soft sigh of contentment as Aomine’s arm slides comfortably around his waist and his large, warm hand starts kneading the flesh of his asscheeks in a de-stressing manner.
“We were at the Maji and instead of the usual teriyaki burger, you ordered some fancy European dish and when the waiter came back with the order and raised the lid, there was a basketball on a silver plate. I remember you challenged me to swallow the whole thing in one go, but luckily I woke up before things could get really nasty.”
Aomine huffs a laugh into the crook of his neck, warm lips pressing softly against his skin and causing a shiver to run through him.
“You think the basketball was a metaphor for my dick?”
“Huh? How did you get a perverted meaning out of that silly dream?”
Aomine pushes himself up on his elbows, hovering over Kagami. His hair, unlike Kagami’s, is too short for a proper bedhead, but his eyes are soft with sleep and his voice is gruff and he looks a strange mix of adorable and sexy when he wakes up.
“Well, I did tell you to swallow the whole thing, didn’t I?”
“But why would your dick be on a silver plate?”
“Because my dick is such a gourmet?”
Kagami huffs a laugh at Aomine’s smug expression, unable to keep a straight face and continue their silly banter like a serious conversation.
“It is, isn’t it? Admit it, Kagami, don’t be shy.”
“Well, it’s alright.”
Aomine pouts childishly at that, but soon regains his cocky expression as he drags a finger across Kagami’s collarbone and over his nipple that is standing a little stiff in the slightly chilly morning air.
“But if your prude, innocent mind had to picture my dick as a basketball in your dream, that means you think of my dick to be as awesome as basketball, right?”
Kagami holds back a moan as Aomine continues playing around with his nipple, with a lazy, self-satisfied smile on his face as he watches a light blush spreading languidly over Kagami’s cheeks.
“Aomine, if you want a blowjob, just say so. You don’t need to break your brain trying to make some perverted sense out of my stupid dreams.”
“Of course I want a blowjob. I want a blowjob all the time. But like, don’t you ever have a wet dream of us or something?”
Kagami frowns as if trying to recall an instance of such dreams. “There was that dream with us caught in a downpour. Does that count?”
“Were we having sex in a fucking downpour? That’s badass.”
Kagami snorts. Aomine is kinda sex-crazed, but Kagami doesn’t really mind that. He just likes teasing his boyfriend. “No. We just got wet.”
Aomine gives him a scandalized look. “Kagami! We have to fix this!”
“Hmm?” Kagami hums lazily as he runs his hands over Aomine's back.
Aomine motions wildly at his head. “This! Your brain. It’s too fucking pure it can’t even imagine a sex scene!”
Kagami has to bite his lip to stop a laugh from bursting out. “Well, maybe if we had enough sex my brain would get the material it needs to make up sexy dreams?”
Aomine looks like a kid that just got his dream Christmas present.
“That sounds like an easy fix. Let’s get to it right away.”
Kagami tightens his arms around Aomine’s waist, pulling his body flush against his.
“Alright.” He mouths at Aomine’s throat and relishes in the slight hitch in the other boy's breath.
Feeling this happy and loved with Aomine is like a dream and a miracle come true.