Work Text:
“Sleep well?” Nana asks, after Toshinori runs down the stairs with a bright grin.
“Yeah! I had a dream!”
“Oh?” Nana asks, wrapping her arm over his shoulder and pulling him in for a side-armed hug. That hug turns into a teasing wrestle, leaving Toshinori wheezing as he tries to free himself from her iron strength headlock. “What’d you dream about, kid?”
“I -- I don’t remember!” Toshinori wiggles out from under her arm. “But it was a really good dream. I just woke up -- thinking…”
Nana prods him with her elbow. “Thinking about what? I’m hanging onto suspense here, Toshi.”
“About the future!” Toshinori spins around and pushes the corners of his mouth up with the tips of his fingers. Like Nana does.
“That’s good,” Nana says, and her smile is more secretive, knowing. “If you’ve got an idea of the future ahead, the better chance you have of making it real!”
He keeps Nana’s smile in the back of his mind as he walks to school. Gran Torino is always telling him he should be more realistic, not to dream so big, to set his head over his shoulders straight before he goes spouting off things like prophecy.
“Hush, you old man,” Nana dismisses him with a little wave, brushing off the air of negativity. “The kid’s got a bright future. He wants to be a monument. He wants to be a pillar. Not just any pillar. The pillar!”
Gran Torino frowns at both of them. “He’s not a damn statue.” Nana laughs. Toshinori isn’t sure if it’s a joke or not, but he laughs too.
The next night, he dreams again. He dreams of a boy, dark hair so curly and wild against his face. A woman beside him, older, with the same dark hair and the front pulled to the back with a simple clip. She smiles, and for a moment Toshinori’s chest aches because her hair and smile remind him of Nana and lifts the worry from his chest.
The boy looks directly at him but he’s too far away for Toshinori to make out what he’s saying. He mouths the words, but whatever they are it’s too indecipherable for Toshinori to figure out what it means. He just keeps mouthing the same thing, over and other, his mouth twisting through the screen and wobbling like a television with a bad signal. As though he’s behind a pane of glass, or maybe a wall, too thick for either of them to reach through. Then he wakes up and the dream dissipates into fog.
Nana asks, “What was your dream about today?”
Toshinori’s face wrinkles. “I don’t know. I saw a boy. He was looking at me, and talking like he was trying to tell me something. But he was too far away.” He shakes his head.
“Well,” Nana says. “It’s just a dream. Sometimes dreams don’t really make sense.” That’s what Toshinori thinks too. He nods.
His next dream doesn’t make much sense either. The glass wall is still there, adding odd shadows and unreal angles. He’s still looking at Toshinori, piercing eyes even through the silvery light and glazed surface.
“I don’t understand,” he says, in a tone that can only be one of surprise. “No, that can’t be right --”
It’s too real, Toshinori thinks, to be a dream. Dreams don’t feel like this at all.
“Who are you?” He demands.
The boy stares at him and doesn’t answer. All Toshinori can think is: those don’t look like the eyes of a child. Then he smiles, and his eyes look normal again, and Toshinori is confused about what made him think that in the first place.
Another dream in which the boy looks directly at him, almost through him, and says, “You’re here.” He doesn’t give Toshinori time to reply before he’s gone again.
The next time, Toshinori is ready. He pushes through the glass wall and stops right in front of the boy. The boy stares up at him, open mouthed, and repeats, “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” Toshinori agrees, although he’s confused where here is, exactly “And you’re here.”
“I am!” Grinning, he asks, “What’s your name?”
“Toshinori. What’s yours?”
“I’m --”
Toshinori wakes up. Restrains the urge to punch the hell out of his pillow just out of sheer frustration.
Nana finds him as he’s rubbing his forehead and pressing his fingers over his eyelids, barely propped up over the table. Being vertical is more challenging than it has any given right to be. For whatever reason, whenever he wakes up from one of those weird dreams he wakes up so tired.
“You’ve been training too hard,” Nana says sympathetically. “Are you sure you don’t want a break?”
“No, I’m fine.” Toshinori forces himself to smile. Nana rubs the top of his head and Toshinori forgets about the boy.
At least for a while. There’s terror and tragedy and the blessing of One For All even though some days it feels more like he’s been handed a curse.
On another night, after Toshinori finally settles into uneasy sleep he dreams again of the boy. He’s closer than he remembers from that first dream. He doesn’t have a chance to do anything before he wakes again and forces himself to rise and complete the motions of the rest of his day.
When the boy returns looking older and wearier. No longer a boy. He’s a man, although a young one, maybe no older than Toshinori.
“You again,” Toshinori says wearily. For whatever reason it makes the other man laugh, and after a moment Toshinori does too. Something about him puts Toshinori right at ease. Like Nana used to.
“I thought these weird dreams were just a thing for kids,” Toshinori tells him. It’s only a dream, anyways. He doubts this figment of his imagination will go off spilling his secrets to the rest of the world.
“Tell me about it.” The man’s smile fades slightly. “Sorry you got all mixed up in this. Not really sure how that happened, if I’m honest. I knew it would have some weird effects on me, but as to how you got here…”
“Well, as long as you’re here,” Toshinori says lightly. “Might as well sit back and relax.” That earns him another laugh.
Settled down, the man studies him for a while and then says, “You look…”
It figures, Toshinori muses, that you can’t lie to yourself. Not even weird dream figments while you’re dead asleep.
Saying the words won’t change anything so he says, “I lost my mentor,” Toshinori tells the man. “She was -- she really was everything to me. I don’t know how I -- I’m not ready. There was still so much --”
“No matter when you left her side, or she left yours,” the man replies. “You will never be ready. Trust me.” His smile is sad, and Toshinori sits beside him. The pain in his smile is familiar. This man understands.
“Have you lost --?”
“I lost my mentor, too.” He wraps a hand around his knee, rubbing the area like it bothers him. “But they’ve been gone a while. And I was --” Eyes closed, head bowed, he inhales like the air brings pain, too. “-- I guess I’m trying to say, I understand.” Toshinori startles at the man’s hand on his shoulder. “We are never ready to let go, and it always hurts. It will hurt for many years after, and sometimes it won’t hurt at all.”
When Nana died, there wasn’t anybody left to hold him and tell him everything would be alright. No more dream big, golden boy. Maybe that’s why the corners of his eyes sting. “I just want to feel okay again.”
The man smiles, big and earnest and none of the weariness from before. “You will have your peace, Toshinori. And you will have peace with your mentor’s death.” He says it like it’s a statement of fact. “One day.”
“How?” Toshinori asks. He isn’t begging, but he feels like he should be. Pleading, maybe. “How can I find peace?”
“Well,” the man’s smile is so wide it splits his face, like the smile Nana taught him. “First you must find hope.”