Work Text:
Kyouji awakens in the evening, dark windows outside, back still sore, or just learning to become sore after the train ride home that day from Kamata. Despite having slept on top of them, his bedsheets are bunched up around his waist, disordered and concentrated in the middle of the bed so that the rest of the mattress is starkly, more obviously, bare.
Since meeting him again, Kyouji's dreamswept, groggy mind would sometimes imagine those bare spaces on his bed were home for a certain boy, now a man—where he'd imagine him in a wrinkled t-shirt, glasses inexplicably not askew, laying in front of him with the same expression as always. Always, they would be talking, as always. Sometimes, he would reach across to that imagined spectre and still not house the bravery within him to touch what would have been safe to touch within the confines of dawn and his old man's imagination.
Kyouji blinks his eyes and straightens his curled spine. He had awakened with wetness between his long eyelashes, and the Satomi in his bed looks younger than before. "What's up with you?" says the Satomi of Kyouji's bed; the voice is soft, hoarse, imagined; more of Kyouji's own than the other's.
Kyouji flattens his palm over the cotton of his mattress cover, pets it for the texture as his nap-heavy brain struggles to rebalance out of the land of dreams and back into reality. He can still see it, behind and above his eyes, the sweet shadows of his dreams: a world unreal and long ago. Where he existed freely, with much anxiety but without worry. He sees, in the shadows and flickers of light, again what his mind had imagined during his afternoon's slumber, the one that had rendered sweat over his chest and between his thighs.
It was the blueness of youth; the way grass smelled when you had yet to know smoke; the way the sun got in your eyes more deeply and the clouds were always overcast. The rub of cheap polyester from summer uniforms; the background chatter of teenagers always laughing and complaining; the way his eyes had looked at people's hands more often.
In that world returned, Kyouji found he was aware of the person beside him the most. Another teenager. Just like him. Bespectacled and heat-heavy, pink splotched messily over cheeks like watercolour clumsily spilled. He had been too scared to say anything in the dream, as if the bubble would pop and he would awaken. Yet he awoke anyway, and Satomi in his bed wore a moss green t-shirt terribly unironed, and Kyouji's eyelashes held water, and his hand held the empty space on the mattress.
"I had a dream," Kyouji says, without opening his mouth. If he had opened his mouth, he would have croaked, or the second bubble would have popped and he would have to go home. "A dream in a different world," he continued.
The fog in his mind was slowly clearing. The sounds of traffic outside were beginning to reach his ears. Soon, the Satomi on his bed would disappear, too. He held on with only the will in his heart, and knew intrinsically that it would not hold for long. "A different world," he said again, palm gliding away from himself, to that empty occupied space in his mind. "We were younger there. And there I was allowed to love you."
He closed his eyes after that, felt the water from his lashes overflow to the place where his cheek touched fabric. "But no more," he said, croaking it. "'M not in that world anymore."
When he opened his eyes a moment later, the space in his bed was empty but for himself, and the traffic was loud, and streetlight peeped in through the crack in the curtains. He was beginning already to forget of what he had been dreaming, though he knew, intrinsically, that it was full of longing and that it would make him sad to remember.
Soon enough, Kyouji rolled over onto his back and winced at the pain as he tried to decide then what to do with the rest of his evening.