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It gets better with time was something Ryoma had been told countless times, but years after the worst of his troubles were over, when his eyes could focus on what was around him instead of the ominous horizon line and his mouth remembered how to smile at nothing in particular, he still dreamed.
He hadn’t expected to be free of them overnight, not after everything he’d seen: his father, full of arrows as if only one could not have done the job; his family, torn asunder by death and destruction and the laughable idea of the existence of a moral high ground; the world he once thought he knew, flipped and turned and landed again, upside-down, no longer fully recognizable.
After thirty years, he might have hoped his unconscious mind would have found peace—enough of the fragile concept to keep him dreaming.
Some dreams were nothing more than memories stained by his own guilt, frustratingly pale and blurred. Compared to the things that could have been, to what his imagination was capable of conjuring up, they were almost welcome.
Tonight’s dream was of the latter persuasion, the colors warm and rich rather than faded reconstruction. He was nearly thirty summers old again, his face barely lined, his mouth unable to remember how to smile.
She was there, too, as she had been back then. Whip-crack smart with freckled skin and a weapon that glinted in the sun. He had always wondered why she felt the need to make herself physically shine when nothing about her had ever been dull. But there she was, a bright beacon against the grass.
She smiled at him, eyes blinking furiously in the harsh light of day, and all he felt in that instant was what others might have called calm assurance. He thought of it as love.
The sky shimmered and settled again, the air growing thin. He knew this place as Valla—or what used to be Valla. Another world flip-turned, worse than his had been, and yet it had been hard to care about it, being nothing more to him than a world of strangers. He’d had his own people to worry about—his own country.
Scarlet was dying. She always died here in this imagined Valla, almost as if her death was supposed to happen, there, and yet never had. Losing her in dreams was easier to accept, somehow. Dreams felt real and yet, to Ryoma, strangely detached from the reality he’d lived and knew: Scarlet had lived through her experiences in Valla through some painful miracle.
Still, the blood affected him. He tried to speak but found nothing in his throat but air. It was just as well; he had never known how to say goodbye to anyone.
“Hey,” she said, her voice little more than a strained whisper.
The compassion in it hurt, but he couldn’t bring himself to respond.
She gestured weakly with a hand, and he followed its movement to the weapon embedded beneath her breastplate.
Raijinto.
“Th–” her voice hissed off into a sad wheeze.
He knelt beside her, fingers too big and clumsy, heart pounding so loudly in his ears he almost couldn’t hear her breathe: it was a sad affair, her respiration a sorrowful little swan song.
“Thank you,” she told him, and smiled.
For what? he wondered, fingers coming to rest on the pommel of his weapon. For this? The thought seemed entirely wrong, horrific, unlikely. He’d never hurt her, never—not before and surely not now—
Sleep faded from him slowly, and he awoke in his room, staring up at the ceiling, hands folded on his stomach. He remembered when all of his dreams woke him violently, when he came back to the reality he lived in shaking, sweating, gasping for air and grasping for something to hold onto. Anything recognizable had worked to calm him, then, and more often than not, it was Scarlet he found in the semi-darkness, her fingers slipping through his, her mouth turned down with concern.
He waited until his heartbeat returned to normal before he turned his head.
She was beside him, one arm out in the cold space between them. He reached for her, tucking her arm back beneath the blankets, brushing her unruly hair out of her face. She stirred, only just, and removed her arm again so that her fingers brushed against his cheek. One eye half-open, she studied him for a moment and smiled. “Bad dream?” she asked.
The corner of his mouth turned up. “Only a dream,” he admitted.
“Still,” she said, and he knew that only Scarlet could convey so much to him with just one word.
“You’re here,” came his belated response.
She pulled his hand down to her face and kissed his knuckles. “Always will be,” she told him, both eyes open as she held his hand against her cheek.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered.
She agreed with a small sound and closed her eyes, smiling, the weight of her face warm against the back of his hand.
And when everything seemed soft and settled again, and the only memories he could bring to mind were pale and faded with well-worn remembering, he slowly removed his hand from her grasp and ran his fingers back through her hair again just to feel it against his skin.