Chapter Text
Wanderer had always been a vivid dreamer. Because, somehow, despite lacking the facilities to be a proper human, he dreamt as one.
As Kabukimono, he hadn’t understood his dreams at first. He dreamt of beautiful things: colorful birds and flowers, various foods and clothing and humans. He had sometimes even daydreamed of people from his dreams, imaginary friends who played with him and helped him with the duties Niwa and the others assigned.
Once Scaramouche left Tatarasuna, there was no point to any of that. Fuck society! Scrub away all human emotions, especially the easily avoidable drivel like dreams! Such things only existed to drag him down!
But once all of that had simmered down and Nahida enrolled him in the Akademiya, his seemingly artificial body found itself in the loving embrace of sleep more frequently than he’d preferred. And not always at his discretion, head-down having a little nap on a stack of papers at three in the morning.
And he was coming to discover that the dreams were weird as fuck. Weirder, even, than the things he had dreamt of as Kabukimono.
Dreams about the ocean, Inazuman script, the Abyss, strange birds and long-necked mammals, chunks of land floating upside down, space— none of it was computing. He wasn’t particularly hungering for a vacation and had never been to most of the places seen in his dreams (and wouldn’t truly want to anyway), though he knew they existed.
It wasn’t until one fateful day of delivering documents to Nahida that he overheard the mention of “shared dreams” and “soulmates.” A cold rock settled in the depths of his stomach.
A what now? Sharing what with who?
He had heard of the phenomenon centuries ago but had always assumed such things didn’t apply to him. He’d let the humans deal with their humanly affairs by themselves.
Beyond that, what poor sap did Celestia (or whoever the fuck) decide to pair him with? Was there a way to opt out?
It would be easiest for everyone involved if Wanderer went on living his life pretending that he didn’t have a soulmate. He’d store up more energy by drinking bitter tea so then he’d never sleep again, and the sap wouldn’t send Wanderer any more weird dreams. All he had to do was wait about eighty years, at which point they’d almost certainly have croaked, and then he could have his restful nights back.
…Nahida somehow immediately sniffed out the change in lifestyle and consequently strongly encouraged him to take “rests” more frequently.
She had a lot of weird thoughts about what she expected his life to look like as her “assistant,” things which required his room to be stuffed with furniture and him to run on a schedule and attend school like a teenager and not a 400-year-old puppet. He didn’t need food, or to sleep, or to attend classes and get along with the other students.
But she wanted him to “give it a shot,” and they’d put these things as the top few goals on his mental list to redemption, so he dubiously went along with it.
So, Wanderer swallowed his pity for the unknown soulmate on the other end of their shared dreams and actually used his bed for the first time in months.
He immediately regretted it.
When he woke in the morning, all he remembered was something about Tatarasuna. Okay, not exactly the first thing he would have wanted to share with his soulmate, but whatever. Maybe they had actually been up all night and missed it anyway.
The more he thought about it, the less he was sure that his soulmate even knew he existed. Because, sure, he had dreamt intermittently about things since joining Nahida in Sumeru, but before that, he had had tons more dreams as the nameless Wanderer and surely some fucked-up things had come from Scaramouche’s head, too.
It would be a miracle if his soulmate’s head was still intact after suffering through so much that they couldn’t remember. Wanderer had to wonder what that one had seen in the past and whether they even remembered any of it now. Maybe Wanderer’s Irminsul erasure had poked holes into all of their dreams, creating a sort of… Swiss cheese.
The thought, to his sudden, abject surprise, sounded a little concerning. Definitely another reason to keep his distance from his soulmate— he’d probably already fucked up their brain enough.
The cold morning air blows through Kaedehara Kazuha’s clothes as though they’re made of silk.
He shutters then tucks his once-bare arm properly into the sleeve of his kimono. Flecks of sea salt scatter off his hair like dandruff, accentuating the already frigid morning with its taste on his tongue.
He’s arranged his legs into an impossible shape, tucked tightly against the ship’s masthead with a notebook wedged between the triangle of open space he’s created in his lap. A cat sometimes tries to rest there, but when that happens, he rests the notebook on their stomach and writes that way.
Captain Beidou struts onto the deck and stretches toward the sky, sparing him one amused glance. “Had another interesting dream? What was it this time?”
“Sword-dancing.”
“Oh yeah? And did you see them?”
Kazuha shakes his head.
He casts a dejected gaze down at his hands still clutching the almost-filled book. The pages in the back are falling apart from the ocean spray, desert sands, miasma, lightning— his book has been through it all with him and filling it up has been a slow, studious process. He has his normal journal, of course, which has seen similar wear and tear, but that doesn’t reach nearly the same level of sentimental value as the dream journal does.
He’s been recording his strange dreams in this journal for over a year and yet there’s still been no sign of the person responsible for them. He’s had his fair share of nightmares standing naked in front of a crowd of people, falling eternally into a black void, and waking up late for class before actually waking up to no such alarm.
He’s learned a lot from his soulmate, and yet, not much at all.
He’s only started dreaming this way about the other person recently, about a year or two ago. Before that, his dreams had a decidedly different flavor to them— more like what he had assumed it would feel like to dream without a soulmate. Dreams that resonate with his poetic nature and feature people from his life like Tomo and Beidou and the Traveler.
There had been a lot more nightmares when he was younger. And dreams he doesn’t quite remember anymore, although he contributes that to the passage of time, sanding down the more vivid images in his memory and softening the edges of his recollections.
He’d just assumed that, along his journeys, he would encounter the person these dreams belong to and that would be that. The reality is that nothing is ever that simple. He could have already encountered them without even realizing it. But whenever he’s been regaled by other people’s tales of how they’ve met their soulmates, it has always sounded so simplistic and easy. Pieces falling casually into place.
His soulmate seems to be an insomniac or otherwise located somewhere on the other side of the world. For someone with the shared dream connection, Kazuha estimates he should be dreaming double or even triple what he is now.
He doesn’t let it bother him. He will go where the wind takes him, and eventually, that path will converge with his soulmate’s, the way it always should.