Chapter Text
There’s this reoccurring dream that Haruka has had since middle school. He’s standing in a never ending pool of water that barely laps over the tops of his toes and the sky is always, always a clear blue. There is a red string, corded but impossibly thin, tied in a drooping bow around his pinky finger and it’s the only thing of color on him. His clothes are white, the sky is clear, the water unmoved. He is alone.
When he first had the dream, rather the first couple of times, Haruka had woken before it could continue past this point. He’d sit up, drenched in sweat, and heaving terrified breaths into his knees having been utterly convinced he’d narrowly escaped a nightmare. Except, the dream kept coming back.
It’s nearly four months of this before anything changes. There’s a laugh that echoes across the water and it’s beautiful. It rings out with a genuine happiness and warmth that Haruka feels in his chest, even long after he wakes up. Things change after that, but stay the same. Haruka is still alone, still in this plain environment, but it’s no longer a stretching quiet.
Following the laugh, there’s also the voice it belongs with. A boy’s voice, airy and clear, but rarely boisterous. Haruka first hears this voice speak in a language he only recognizes as English because of the old school American mob movies he likes to watch. The voice is filled with a teasing amusement, laughter running underneath every syllable in a way that makes Haruka want to laugh with them. It’s sweet, the voice’s sing-songing tone that doesn’t quite match the soft manner they speak in but does match the amusement that colors it.
The next time he dreams of the reflective emptiness and the pretty voice, they’re once again speaking in another language. He doesn’t quite recognize it, not until nearly a week after the dream and he’s chanced upon a video of a pair of fighters from China - his mysterious dream voice had spoken Mandarin. They’d spoken with an easy familiarity that hinted towards growing up with it and an almost lazy confidence. His mystery voice had been angry, even if their volume was no louder than before. The sharpness of their voice as it threw out words like daggers, and then the melodious quality of how they spoke had darkened attractively. A shiver rolled down Haruka’s spine whenever his thoughts wandered back to it.
By the time he’s moving to Makochi and starting Furin, he’s been having these dreams for years. The sound of this mysterious boy across many languages and emotions is as familiar to Haruka as the scars on his own body. He wonders, idly from time to time, what they look like.
Haruka’s first night in Makochi, barely twenty four hours before his first day at Furin, is when the dream’s setting first changes. The sky is still a cloudless, clear blue and the water is still no deeper, still reflective as a mirror. Except now the space is no longer a wide open unbroken and unending expanse. Now there are trees sprouting all around him. None are tall, all still saplings that he cannot make heads or tails of.
The boy who’s haunted his dreams for years is giggling. As the bubbly sound swells around Haruka, he feels it fill him up till all he can do is grin stupidly at the saplings. Footsteps splatter from behind him, the water rippling, and Haruka turns to see a faint specter of three boys. Two are clearly older, their mouths moving but no sound accompanies the movement. The shorter, younger boy is the source of the laughter.
They’re play fighting, rough housing like siblings in movies do, and Haruka wishes desperately that he could make out the boy’s features better. The boy moves deceptively fast, nimble on his feet, and he quips something in what Haruka now recognizes as Korean. Haruka’s heart swells when the boy’s laugh rings out, unrestrained and pleased, at whatever his companions say in return. He catches nothing of use of the boy’s features, not his eye or hair color. All Haruka has is the bone deep familiarity of his voice from years of dreaming it and the way the mischievous curl of the boy’s mouth makes Haruka’s whole body feel like a live wire.
Haruka wakes for his first day of Furin with the soothing sound of his dream boy’s laugh still in his ears and the feeling that his life is going to be better from this day forward. No matter what.
Suo Hayato is strong. That is Haruka’s first thought of this increasingly infuriating boy that Nirei had excitedly stuttered and babbled about. His second thought is that Suo Hayato is pretty. He’s pretty in a lot of ways. Mostly pretty annoying and pretty stupid.
Haruka is resolved to not like him until they’re at Ori and facing off with Shishitoren. Suo Hayato is pretty annoying, pretty stupid, and pretty shitty. He's got a craptastic personality that makes Haruka want to punch him. However, something about the tone of his voice as he speaks to his opponent, a condescending and teasing lilt, makes Haruka’s chest feel tight. It feels familiar, but sounds wrong in Japanese for some reason. Haruka can’t place why.
It’s not until they’re all back at Kotoha’s cafe and Haruka’s been able to let his mind wander a bit during the walk that he finds himself back at that moment. Why did Suo in that fight sound wrong speaking like that in Japanese? For that matter, why did Suo’s fighting feel like Haruka had seen it before? Why was it so easy to accept that Suo could have been a foreigner when he teased Haruka initially? Why did everything about Suo feel familiar but also wrong? Like walking into your home and you don’t realize everything’s been moved just slightly to the left. He wonders if Suo knows Mandarin?
He watches as Suo speaks with Nirei, sees his mouth quirk just the slightest bit up as he goes to speak. It’s a kind smile, reassuring and sweet. He sees Suo smile again later. This time he’s behind Sugishita, as he lifts a chair and shouts at Haruka. Suo’s mouth is smiling but it’s a little meaner. His eye glitters with something that Haruka isn’t quite sure of yet. It feels like mischief and paired with his words, it makes Haruka almost more certain that’s what it is.
That smile sticks in his head too. Something about it is familiar.
Haruka falls asleep thinking about Suo and the way his wrist had felt in his hand when he’d stopped him. There had been so much anger in Suo’s frame that the muscles of his arm had been horribly taut with the emotion. It’s been a few days since the fight with KEEL and having moved on from his own angst, Haruka couldn’t stop his mind from wandering back to that moment. He wonders what Suo’s expression looked like when Haruka stopped him.
There is an awful screaming echoing in his dream when he opens his eyes to that unchanging sky. The trees are taller, trunks thicker. It’s not quite enough to block his ability to try and find the source of the screaming. The cord wrapped around Haruka’s finger loops around his wrist and pulls. He’s stumbling around the trees in an almost desperate attempt to follow. Until it stops.
Pulled in a loose drape from Haruka’s wrist to unravel messily across the space between himself and…
It’s that boy. His dream boy.
The cord changes half way between them and becomes a ribbon that’s flat, wide, and shiny. The vermillion hue is starkly contrasting in the pale blue water and the white of their clothing. For Haruka it is a thin, tightly corded thread that wraps gently around his pinky in a loose bow. However, for the boy, Haruka can see that the ribbon is wrapped loosely around his waist, draped in messy arcs over his arms, and wrapped tightly around his neck in a bow reminiscent of when someone gives an animal as a gift. The screaming is coming from the boy, his boy.
There are only trees surrounding them that have branches heavy with little dark pink flowers. A wind that neither Haruka nor the boy feel rips through their little clearing and the branches shake violently. He can get no closer to the boy, an invisible force like a wall of glass keeps him stepping any closer. No amount of yelling or beating his hands on that divider gets the boy to look at Haruka. He wakes up, feeling frustrated and ill, and like there's somwthing important slipping through his fingers.
The dreams change after that. Haruka is almost always running in all of them now. Chasing after the specter of the boy and following the pulls of his thread. As more time passes, the trees get taller and wider. He has to put more effort into dodging around them and they obscure his view of the boy whenever he gets close enough.
There is no more windchime laughter ringing in his ears. No more chatter in various languages in a pretty voice that haunts his waking hours. All Haruka has now is the sound of their footsteps splashing and his own begging frustration. The dreams and the boy are trying to tell him something, he knows it, but he can't figure out what that is.
It's not until Suo is gone and they're doing everything they can to keep it together while searching for him that Nirei cracks everything Haruka had been trying to figure out on his own. What's worse is he has no idea that he's just shattered and rebuilt everything Haruka knows.
Haruka’s dreams have held elm trees, which are Nirei. They've held plum trees heavy with flowers for Umemiya. Cedar, holly, mulberry, citrus… the list goes on and on. All representative of the people who now fill his life that he cares so much for and they're there. In his dreams!
And the redbud trees, everywhere. The thicket of them surrounding the boy who’s haunted his dreams since middle school. The answer to the identity of that boy, his boy, had been there. Staring him in the face since the dream after they fought Keel.
Suo, Suo, Suo.
Haruka feels like he understands everything that the dreams had been showing him and nothing at all.
The dream he has after that realization coupled with the heartbreak that was Endo finding Suo was the closest to a nightmare that Haruka's had since moving to Makochi. The normally bright space is now dark and Haruka realizes he can see Suo in the distance. The green of his Furin jacket, the yellow of his earrings… it all makes something painful throb within him and he tries to reach for Suo. Haruka tries to run to Suo. Haruka falls, rooted to the floor, and trying desperately to keep his eyes on Suo.
There are strings, so many strings between them, connecting them. He hadn't noticed them before. Nor had he noticed that the red string there always had been on his finger was gone. There's a tickling feeling in his right arm that distracts him and when he looks down, there are redbud saplings growing.
He has so many questions for Suo. So many things he wants answers for. When he looks back up, Suo is beginning to walk away. It's all he can do to scream after him, to try unsuccessfully to follow him, to try to reach Suo. The strings begin to rip the saplings from his arm.
Sakura wakes up wincing, four bloody crescents in his right palm.
The string had been missing in his last dream, but now he could see it outside of his dreams. Bright vermillion tied in a sloppy, sad bow around his pinky and looped, unseen by all but him, around his wrist. It's cold against his skin and occasionally it tightens ever so slightly. Haruka pretends it's not there, even as they plan and plot on how to get to Suo.
Haruka is so tired. He just wants to talk to Suo. He just wants Suo back, with them.
He just wants Suo.