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To what degree is a dream? What distinguishes reality from a realm of sleep?
The line in the sand, is it so rigid that a gust of wind cannot blow it away? If a harsh storm were to occur, would the grains not flutter about until there was no line? Or would the constant buffering dig a deeper etch? One so prominent, not unlike a bleeding wound, one that did not leave any room for these senseless questions.
Yodaka found himself asking these quite a lot, despite their pointlessness.
Never aloud, of course, and never to Yuda, who would dutifully tend the bar until a woman gave him even a single lick of attention.
He would ask when he was roused from sleep, when the dreams he had would dissolve with a single rub of his eyes. The magic spell, or the terrible nightmare, disappeared as if they were never a part of his world to begin with. As if Yodaka did not dream.
But he did, he was certain of it. Those deep sleeps and the searing pain in his head. How Yuda would jest that he spent more time asleep on the couch than he was awake to greet guests and mix their cocktails.
How a certain sin lingered at the back of his mind.
And of course, there was...that.
He found himself standing at a threshold. A white door frame, the door itself pushed open in resemblance of a perfect right angle. Yodaka rested his hand against it, feeling the subtle grooves and flecking paint that ran all along the woodwork. It was reminiscent of what was comfortable to him. The aging, stuttering appliances of Yumejuya that always needed to be sent in for repairs. The bar’s sole bathroom, where a floral wallpaper peeled at the edges. All accompanied with a heavy bout of complaints and remarks from Yuda, who despite his qualms, never seemed to want to leave. After all, he was never late for his shifts. Duty bound, that one. Yodaka never once questioned his decision to hire that man, even as the sudden taste of pills burned on his tongue.
His head began to throb.
“Yodaaaa, are ya gonna come in or not~”
A voice dragged him out of his stupor, the sharp pain in his head fizzling out in static. His hand now gripping the door frame instead of its prior idleness, fingernails speckled white with paint. He blinked away the memory, or perhaps the dream, glassy eyes fixating on the scene before him.
He toed the line at a bedroom, split by the three who shared its contents. One portion was clean, books and trinkets stacked in neat piles and put away on shelves. For a moment, Yodaka imagined the twins were there. Toi sitting cross-legged on his bed, hands clasped together in silent meditation while Ryui sat hunched at his desk, toying with his eyepatch with one hand while the other scrawled notes in the margins of his law book. They engaged in a peaceful, shared silence, the only noise the scratch of a pen and the mutterings of its owner. Occasionally, Toi would open an eye, smile at his brother, and shut it again, exhaling in content as he did.
Yodaka thought this was close to what tranquility felt like.
“Heyyyyy, hey! Are you there Yoda?”
As Yodaka forced his gaze to the other side of the room the twins disappeared, gone as fast as they had blurred into his reality. He blinked again, rubbing his temple with his free hand despite the absence of a headache.
“I’m sorry, Netaro. It seems I am still half-asleep.”
He looked at the other side of the room, beyond that imaginary line drawn as a boundary and into the space of the other who lived there too. He was laying on his bed, elbows propping him up as he splayed out on his stomach. A stack of books taller than even Yodaka somehow balanced atop the soft mattress, wobbling with the subtle movements of his body. The spines reflected a wide variety of topics, from criminology to the vast expanse of human emotions to love and interpersonal relationships to even—
Dreams.
“You came from your bar.” Netaro said, plain and without question. He flipped through a page of the book he was reading, humming as if he were pleased by its contents. Yodaka noticed he wasn’t even looking at him.
“I had Yuda close up shop today. I was feeling…”
His temples ached again, and he grit his teeth. Somewhere along the way, the evening had become apart of his past. Even as the headaches lessened in their frequency and the medications were returned to Yuda, there were nights like this.
Nights where he yearned. Ached. Where he felt close to grasping those fragments of himself in shaking palms and facing himself as if all he needed to do was look in a mirror.
He was able to do it back then. The night he stood across from Yuda, only the bar, only a boundary, between their bodies and their souls.
He was able to face him. Even if his memories didn’t return, and as all the sand began to twist and shift. He was able to learn a certain truth. One that existed in the rigid realm of his reality.
But there was still sand in his eyes. A lot of it. It leaked from his mind into his pupils and obscured what he thought he should know. Despite his declarations, his promise, to recover the truth of his memories on his own, it always ended like this.
It was all a haze. It was a pond. The feeling of drowning. A dead body on his back. A single lily fluttering in the breeze. Space. A glimmering shower of meteors. “That” person. Waiting.
Waiting for what?
It was still fragmented. As if someone dropped a clock at his feet and watched the cogs and pieces explode against hardwood floor. And he would have to pick up the pieces. To sit at his desk and repair the clockwork. Made sure it could still tick. Could still tell time with the accuracy it had once had.
But Yodaka didn’t know if it had ever told time in the first place.
He was sitting on Netaro’s bed now. The one with that name now sitting beside him, books “put away” into heaps on the floor. Broken gadgets and materials Yodaka couldn’t even fathom lay amongst the literature. A trash pile compared to the serenity of the other side of the room. In spite of the mess he exhaled, his head beginning to clear.
“Is Yoda awake now~?”
Netaro tilted his head, his antennae bouncing with the motions. He looked at Yodaka expectantly, lips pulled back into a smile that meshed gentleness with a hunger for knowledge. His sharp canines peeking out from beneath.
To be sure, Yodaka blinked a few times, incapable of removing the permanent glaze of his irises but enough to prevent sand from spilling all over Netaro’s carpet.
“Yes, I am. Did I worry you, Netaro?”
He knew not much fazed his unit-mate, or at least his predicament had once been background noise to his friend. He was always loud. Always expressing a certain eagerness Yodaka thought was similar to that of a school kid. Netaro was either reading or creating an invention of unfathomable skill and proportion. And it was perhaps thanks to one of those creations that Yodaka found himself in the room across the hall from his own. Pulled along by the invisible string called ‘fate.’
“Mmmmm.” Netaro began, humming in the same tune as he did when he found something to be particularly interesting. “Yes, I think you did. You were standing there, opening and closing your eyes, not responding when I called out to you.”
“…”
“Humans are so peculiar~! You weren’t asleep and yet it was as if Yoda was verrrryyy far away in the moment. Where exactly did you go?”
“I stopped taking the supplements”
“Mhmm.”
“We...I stopped using your machine too.”
“The Dreamory Printer? Yup, it’s somewhere in here but I do not know where!”
“I even faced him, and yet…” Yodaka trailed off, averting his eyes from Netaro. Even despite that day, things didn’t magically fall into place. It would be foolish to think ones memories could return after the immense suppression Yuda imposed on his mind. It was all still buried under a thick fog. And it was only a recent development that Yuda gave him the torch to traverse through it.
“Ah I see, I see!” Netaro said, and Yodaka thought it was a bit too cheerful for the moment. For their usual conversations. “Your memories have not returned. Not even a little bit.”
“I still cannot recall my dreams.” Yodaka said, trying to find something to do with his hands as Netaro’s mismatched eyes latched onto every word, his attention a bit too focused. “And my headaches come and go. Sometimes... I still cannot discern when I am asleep and when I am awake. I take three steps forward and two steps back. It’s like the person I really am is still out of reach...”
The lines in the sand are shifting again. Where do I stand behind it now?
At this Netaro did not reply. His mouth drooped and his eyebrows twitched as he listened to Yodaka’s delicate concerns. He brought a hand to his chin in thought, scanning the piles on the floor as if a solution was about to pop out and all of Yodaka’s memories would come flooding back to him. As if there really were an invention of his that could solve everything.
And in that moment, they both wished they could fix everything.
After what felt like eternity, Netaro spoke.
“Say Yoda, ya wanna use it again?”
“...Mm?”
“Ya came in here for a reason, right~? Did your human subconscious mind lead you right back to it? It is in here somewhere. I even have something that could locate it for you. I am a genius after all~”
Netaro made a show of looking around, one of his braids smacking against the side of Yodaka’s head in the search process, although the other man did not look up.
He didn’t think he had anything to say to that.
The mattress shifted, the weight of Netaro now a ghost as he vanished from the room. Yodaka’s head snapped up, his breath quickening as the warmth of lingering body heat began to dissipate.
Was this too a waking dream?
“Here!” A voice said, and Yodaka saw a figure at the threshold. A cold sensation spread across his lap after a soft thud. Yodaka looked down.
“Is this…?” He couldn’t help but smile.
“Yuppp~” Netaro said, as Yodaka’s brain had finished registering that it was he who was standing in the doorway. In his hand was a chilled bottle of green tea, the same one that was now resting in the tired man’s lap.
“I got some from the fridge. It was for Gii, but…”
Yodaka watched Netaro sway a bit in the doorway, as if he were a water lily tracing the surface of a pond. He could almost hear the gears turning in his brain, his tongue mouthing over potential syllables.
Yodaka uncapped his bottle of tea.
“Well! It’s “love” after all. The tea is “love” too.”
Love… Yodaka suppressed the sudden urge to cough.
Netaro skipped as he entered his room, leaping onto his mattress before righting himself to sit cross-legged beside Yodaka again. He followed suit, uncapping his tea but not bringing it to his lips to sip its contents. Mimicry, or just a simple courtesy. Yodaka took a sip.
Netaro sighed. “You can’t.”
“You can’t use it again.”
So that’s what this is about…
“...I see.”
Yodaka clenched the tea bottle in his hands, the beads of condensation moistening his palms. So that’s what this all was. He had come here unconsciously. Dragged at the wrist by his own desires and he felt himself begin to choke on the desperation. At a point in time, Netaro held a solution. Presented it to him on a sparkling silver platter and with a grin that was too wide and contained too many teeth. And it worked.
He had been able to pierce the surface tension of his dreams.
But only for a moment. Until he started to sink. Until Yodaka could do nothing but drown in water of his memories. Destroying himself piece by piece, petal by petal.
Until Netaro…
“So you brought me tea because...”
“Because it’s right in the middle.”
He remembered Netaro had said something like that before. When the two of them were alone in that sea of stars. As they floated, chatted, brought Yodaka back to reality. After all, Netaro promised everyone would forgive him if he returned.
And he did. They all did.
“Right.”
“It’s human kindness,” Netaro added, as if it were an important amendment to his thesis.
“Mm…” Yodaka felt his eyelids begin to droop.
“I’m knocking in the middle again. Because...because I can't let you use it. I promised I would invent something else, but I haven’t. Not yet. But—“
Yodaka resisted the urge to close his eyes. To allow his lashes to flutter against the skin of his cheeks as he slipped away to another world. The onset of drowsiness was sudden, as if the sound of Netaro’s worries had the same prowess of a gentle lullaby. But if he did just so, Netaro would be gone and Yodaka would be somewhere else. The absence of that presence, that warm body…
Where was he going?
“I still want to help.”
The voice came out small, and Yodaka didn’t register at first that it had come from Netaro. Netaro who stood on the opposing side of tranquility. Intensity pulsed from his core, imbued in his words, his actions, his style of dress. The eccentricity of his inventions, the curious flavors of the buns sold at his cafe. Compared to now, where he was quiet, stuck in a web of contemplation. Yodaka had never seen Netaro shrink himself to this degree. And for his sake, at that.
It was time for it to be his turn to knock in the middle.
After all, this is human kindness.
Yodaka tried his best to will away the siren song of slumber. He blinked, taking another sip of tea and focused on the feel of the chilled liquid sliding down his throat. The taste was muted, the concept of bitter leaves reminiscent of Chinese medicine. He swallowed.
“You’ve helped a lot already, Netaro.”
“Hmmmmm? I have?”
“You brought me this,” Yodaka said, shaking the bottle of tea.
Netaro laughed, a tight feeling hitched in Yodaka’s chest.
“Is tea the solution to your problems then?”
“Hmm, not quite. But you gave it to me back then and you gave it to me now. ...You’re trying to cheer me up.”
“Ahahahaha~ Am I now? So, is it working?”
Yodaka smiled as Netaro’s uncharacteristic drop in mood was swept away by an ocean tide. He looked expectant, sparkling eyes opened wide. Scanning Yodaka in shades of red and blue, searching for a sign that he too was happy, that his attempt had succeeded.
Genuine care or a scientific infatuation. Yodaka did not ponder which one it was. It didn’t matter.
“I suppose it is.” Yodaka admitted, the tightness in his chest moving up to his throat. He tried to clear it, the feeling sticking in his esophagus around awkward swallows.
“Hmm, yes. That’s good then, very good.”
Netaro set his bottle down, seemingly uninterested in the swirling green contents despite procuring one for himself. It was a rare sight to see him so apathetic about consumption. He complained quite often about being hungry, especially to Nagi. Yodaka could account for all the times he saw him draping himself over the florist, begging in his ear for dinner or for “that”. Whatever “that” was Yodaka was thoroughly unsure, and he wasn’t too keen on asking. It was not his business what his unit-mates got up to, although it was surprising to know Nagi was somehow involved. He didn’t seem to be the type.
While his spirits had been lifted, Netaro still stared at him as if he were on the cusp of a discovery. His eyes glinted, catching the soft lighting of the room like rare gemstones. It was only now that Yodaka noted how peculiar they were. The shades were inhuman, his pupils mismatched. In a sense, it made Netaro seem...off. Otherworldly, somehow. But when he tried to put a finger to it, to point out what about it was so strange to him, it too began to crumble. To fade into dust and fall into the endless sieve of his memory.
How strange. It’s not like Netaro is apart of the gap in his mind. He’s not like Yuda. He’s not like his mother or his father. And he is certainly not like “that” person.
How amusing. It seems we both have a “that”.
Netaro shifted closer, a sliver of negative space between their knees.
“Say, Yoda…” he spoke again, reeling in the lull of the conversation, “What do humans do in a situation like this?”
The question caught him off guard. Despite his tendency to drown in the sands of the hourglass, it rang out as clear as a bell’s soft chime.
Yodaka tried to clear his throat again to speak, but whatever had crawled up there was persistent. It stretched down again to his chest without loosening its sharp claws in his throat. Each soft gesture, every kind look and carefully selected question, it had all begun to burn like swallowed whisky.
No matter what he did, he could not draw away the piercing gaze of Netaro’s worry. He could smile, accept his gifts of love, fall into the comfortable silence alongside his cherished friend. But something was dragging its claws in Netaro too, sinking deep until raw emotion sprung forth. He had given him looks like this before, in that ocean of starlight, and spoken gently in place of his usual noise. But had hummed a bit more there, Yodaka remembered. Had a smile on his face as tender as the final beats of twilight. It was akin to the rustle of glass against wood, of quiet chatter, of the jazz playing in the tranquil space of his bar.
But there was no tranquility here. They were both going to sink to the bottom of their own depths at this rate.
Yodaka would have to create some then. And he knew a few matters of “how”.
So he pulls Netaro into his arms, closing the gap with a bump of their legs as he wraps himself around the smaller man. He repositions his body once, quelling an awkward strain from arising between twisted shoulders. Side-by-side wasn’t ideal for an embrace, but it’s not as if Yodaka had never hugged someone like this before.
Netaro, however, stiffens like this is his first time. He shifts his stare to Yodaka’s face before angling himself to look at the large arms squeezing his back and shoulders. His face oscillates through a bunch of small motions— raised eyebrows, a quiver of his lip, remarkably wide eyes— before he settles on an amused hum.
“Oya. What’s this Yoda~? From my research this seems to be what humans call a ‘hug’, a gesture commonly reserved for comfort and familiarity between friends and lovers. I—“
Yodaka chuckles, “Have you never been hugged before Netaro?”
“No, this is my first time receiving one. Do you consider us close then, Yoda?”
Yodaka closed his eyes, resting his chin on the top of Netaro’s head. His hair was soft, pillowy, the tall upright strand of it caressing his cheek. He was certain he could fall asleep here, and he would’ve, if not for the fact there was much more to be said.
“…I do.”
Whatever was constricting him had loosened its grip, withdrawing as it sank into obscurity like a fading dream.
He had been drawn here for a reason. It wasn’t to use Netaro’s invention again, an incorrect assumption hypothesized by the both of them. But who could blame them? Science tended to start obvious before it moved to imperceptible.
Netaro snaked his arms to clasp around Yodaka’s chest, slotting himself beneath his own raised arms. His head found empty space between Yodaka’s neck and shoulder, snapping their bodies into a firm yet soft place. He felt warmer than anything.
Of course, it was to find solace in this space. The space created by Netaro’s peculiarities and charms. The person that promised to help him, even if that help had almost destroyed him.
But Yodaka was still in one piece, all thanks to Netaro. There was a zero percent chance anyone would have to pick up his broken shards if he was never shattered to begin with. The knocks would always come in the middle of that cross-section window. Effort always ending at the halfway mark between zero and one.
And that was alright with him. It was kindness, after all.
“Hey, hey, Yoda~. Are hugs “love” too?” Netaro said, mumbling into Yodaka’s shoulder blade. While the gesture was alien to him he had settled in quickly, the body heat making his thoughts feel like mush around the edges. All worry had bubbled up and drifted to a faraway place. But they left behind an untraceable feeling.
His query was met with a soft sigh.
“…”
“Hehehe, fell asleep, huh?”
Netaro smiled, pushing down his feelings as he tried to shift closer, if that was even achievable. But he wanted to chase the warmth a little longer. To see what sort of boundaries were there to stop him when he could no longer meld his body to Yodaka’s. At what point would the heat become as unbearable as it did that time in the sauna? He had already promised Nagi that only he and Ryui would be used as test subjects. He would have to pull away before he would be urged to consume Yodaka from top to bottom. To fill the “love” shaped hole left behind by his unanswered question.
“Goodnight, Yoda,” he whispered, “Let’s meet again in another dream~”