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Tsuna darted glances around the meadow and wondered if this was all right.
"Won't we bother whoever's having the dream by walking through it like this?" he asked Chrome. "What if we wake them up?" He looked uncertainly at the long grass bending over his slippers, waiting for it to vanish and leave the two of them falling through someone's brain, all grey and gross.
"It would be easy to walk into a different dream if that happened," she said.
"Oh." Tsuna shuffled along, and eventually lifted his eyes from the still-not-treacherous ground. Chrome walked ahead, dressed in a Kokuyo uniform even though it was night time. Didn't she have other clothes? He was in his pyjamas and house slippers, or at least imagining that he was, while the only difference to her normal outfit was that she was barefoot. Maybe she really liked the uniform...
An urgent thought occurred to him. "Wait, how do you find someone else's dream from here?” Tsuna asked, slippers flip-flapping awkwardly as he hurried to catch up to Chrome. "Do the dreaming people have to know each other?"
"I think it might help. But..." She looked at the trident she held with both hands. "I can find a way even if they don't."
"Oh. That's good." Chrome could be so certain sometimes, even now when she looked a little sleepy. He wished he had the knack.
Assured, Tsuna took in the landscape properly. Luckily there wasn't any stuff like the giant moths or thousands of laughing voices or other things he had nightmares about - there wasn't anything dreamlike about it, really. Their surroundings looked like they could be real, though he'd never been in a place like this before.
It was a little wild. There were plants as far as he could see, with hills going blue-green in the distance. In some places the grass reached his hips. The sun was hot enough that it could be summertime, though it was autumn in the real world lately. A few short trees dotted the landscape, twisted but lush and green, and everywhere there was flowers, fallen leaves and feathers. It was like being on holiday somewhere far away and exotic (that wasn’t Mafia Island), and he started to smile.
A few things were weird. It should have been frightening - sounds from nowhere, places where there was a smell of the sea, and wispy patches of movement passing them that were shaped almost like people. He made out gestures and colours and clothes ... and a lot of it left familiar impressions. Was the dreamer someone he knew, dreaming of mutual acquaintances? He would have worried about that, but it was as if the entire landscape had a feeling of … was it happiness? Well … like breathing out – relief, maybe - and warm satisfaction, drifting unexpectedly about. That was close enough.
"Most of this is so real," Tsuna said in awe. "When I have dreams, they don't make this much sense." Not even a little!
Chrome's pink cheeks got pinker. "It's partly illusion. I can strengthen dreams so they're more ... like this."
"Do you go on walks like this a lot?"
She nodded. “When Mukuro-sama trained me … this was a big part of it.”
Tsuna was about to try and find out if their current stroll involved someone he knew by asking if she'd ever walked into a friend's dreams, and then thought that she might say Yes. Yours. He decided that he never, ever wanted to find out.
They walked past a sheet of grass paler and more ragged-looking than the rest, but in the heat it gave off a scent like... Tsuna stopped walking and sniffed. Like the lemon-cream biscuit sandwiches that I-Pin and Lambo went wild for a few months ago. He smiled. This was more like a dream.
He poked the grass patch a bit to see if it wasn't growing biscuit sandwiches, and then a sense of something wrong crept over him. It was quieter. He couldn't hear insects and the birdcalls seemed further away.
Tsuna looked up. It was night on his left, as dark as if a bucket had fallen over his head. The grass was gone and the ground was bare and stony - it had all been fine just a few seconds ago! In the middle of it stood Chrome, looking at him over her shoulder. She seemed to be shrinking, and he started to run. "Chrome! Are you-"
He couldn't finish asking if she was all right before she was close again, the distance vanishing. Two steps before he stopped the warmth of the sun was on the back of his neck again, night fading from the landscape like there was a super-fast sunrise. It made his eyes water. Chrome stared up at him, and he realised that the dream hadn't been making her shrink, she'd been scared and had hunched up her shoulders.
"What's going on?" he said. "Is it safe?"
"That kind of thing can happen." Chrome hunched up more. He watched her hands work around the shaft of the trident, her knuckles showing up white.
"Do you think it's going to happen again?" Tsuna asked softly. He wished a little that he was like Yamamoto, and could just put an arm around her shoulders without thinking twice about it. Or at least pat her shoulder.
Chrome looked at him with an almost luminous eye, so intently that he blinked. Then she looked down. "I don't think so. That..." She took a deep breath. "Was a feeling from the dreamer, coming into the dream. And if you stay close, it shouldn’t … happen again. That kind of thing."
A sudden, ugly night in this garden-wilderness - it couldn't have been a good feeling. Whoever was having the dream must have been upset.
"It seems mean..." Tsuna shifted from foot to foot, marvelling at how real it all was, down to his feet slipping around in the overlarge slippers. "Going into someone else's mind like this... Thank you for inviting me for a walk, but maybe ... we shouldn't."
"It's my dream."
Tsuna looked back to her, startled. "Huh? This is..." He stepped back and looked around wildly.
"It's all right, in that case. Isn't it?"
It was better. In other ways it was far worse; his stomach turned over and a blush flooded his face. He stared at her and then hurriedly looked away - but technically everything around him was Chrome. Under his feet! In his lungs!! He squinted his eyes shut. "I-i-it's all right?"
"Boss?" said Chrome. She really didn't sound certain now. In fact, she sounded like she might be as embarrassed as he was, and - he didn't want that.
Tsuna opened one eye, then the other, and said, "Thank you." He tried to add that it was really nice of her to ask him to come, but he actually thought it was weird, so he smiled. Chrome looked stricken as she smiled back, and deeply relieved.
Why did you ask me? We barely talk on normal days, when there's nothing about the mafia going on... But he couldn't ask that. They were each as bad as the other, Tsuna realised. He didn't want to talk about something so personal and neither did she; she only wanted him here. So that he could see something beautiful.
"Let's go," said Tsuna. "This is, this is all ... I've never seen anything like this." Like you? Maybe now he knew her better than he had through fights and group outings, and maybe he wouldn't remember this in the morning. It was hard to remember dreams.
They continued their walk. Tsuna fumbled for conversation and talked about the biscuit sandwich-grass, and felt stupid when Chrome told him it was a real plant that had taken over a patch at Kokuyo Land, called lemongrass. She didn't mean to make him feel that way, though, so he said it smelled nice, and then froze when he thought that maybe it was like telling Chrome that she smelled nice...
He forgot the embarrassment when he noticed Chrome was hunching up again, and when he tried to figure out what was wrong, saw the dream of his hand in hers; a wispy ghost of a thing. It looked really weird, especially since Chrome had both hands clutching her trident.
There was simply no need for her to feel so bad about it. Tsuna decided to put his hand where the dream hand was, and suddenly her trident was in her one hand and the other held his.
It was too mutually firm and he didn't know exactly what either of them meant by it or if she could tell he'd never done this before and too easy, even if he thought this was the better action to take. Then he saw Chrome smile – wow! With only him around, and not anyone from Kokuyo, or one of the girls? - and an answering smile grew on his face. Tsuna’s heart thudded. He wondered if this floaty feeling and the general fact that he wasn't falling all over himself could really be completely true. Could the two of them be like this around each other, hiding fewer and fewer things? This smile, was it his own? He thought that it was, but here in this beautiful world of hers…
If it was a dream too, it was a good one.