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Kozue dreams.
It’s an easy thing to do, dreaming. Shows you what you want, shows you the depths of human creativity, shows you fears, depravities.
Kozue dreams of herself. Sitting beside herself, the reflection is still in her middle school uniform, still in lipstick too old for her, still looking out with eyes blank from self hatred and trauma and curious from youth.
The other her looks over.
“See something you like?” she asks.
“Anything but,” Kozue says. “I see a dirty little creature.”
“”And I see a dirty adult,” the younger her says, and she laughs. “We’re locked in the same place. I was always going to turn out like you.”
Her top is falling open, showing nothing. Nothing there, nothing changing. Empty eyes full of curiosity.
“Still nothing but hate?” the little monster asks.
“You know the only mirror we ever loved.”
Nanami appears one day, and Kozue’s sitting at a cafe. Nanami defies the laws of reality, but she always seems to be there when Kozue is trying to think, or not to think, or not to feel.
(A little monster’s empty eyes follow her.)
“Oh, I love this place,” Nanami says. “Fancy seeing you here, though.”
“Don’t you live across the country?” Kozue asks.
“I do,” Nanami says, nodding. “You’re across the country. Did you forget? You must be fucking lost.”
Kozue rolls her eyes, more petty now than she was at even age thirteen.
“I haven’t been sleeping well is all,” she says. “I’ve been…”
“Lonely?”
“Busy,” Kozue says. “I guess I… nevermind, it’s stupid.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“...yes you will.”
“...Yes, I will,” Nanami replies. “If it’s actually stupid.”
“I keep meeting my younger self in dreams,” Kozue says. “The little monster.”
Nanami, the bitch, laughs.
“Maybe coffee isn’t strong enough for this talk,” Nanami says. Kozue carefully doesn’t point out Nanami ordered a milkshake. “Wanna meet at a bar, instead?”
The little monster kisses her. Kozue stares at it, and it’s not a child, anymore. It’s her.
“I’m still trapped," it says, dressed in a militaristic uniform. Kozu remembers being the little monster (wait, too literal…) and laughing when Miki first came through the door in his little student council getup. She called it stupid on a little boy.
“You do it to yourself,” Kozue says. “Childhood imaginings of fate and futures. Everyone has them. I hate you more.”
“But I’m you.”
“Exactly,” Kozue exclaims, and twists them. Suddenly, she’s the one in her middle school uniform, pinning her knighted grown self. The force is so much that the crash crushes the piano beneath them. It bleeds, oozing on the floor.
The monster kisses her again.
“Coward,” she whispers up close to her, so sharp Kozue almost realizes this is more than a dream, more awake than she’s been in so long. So loud that it echoes impossibly.
“If I killed you,” Kozue says. “The world world be better off.”
“Yeah, it would,” the monster says.
Kozue wakes up breathless.
“So it changed?” Nanami asks. Kozue looks down at her tenth glass of wine - of course Nanami drinks wine. She drinks too much, probably, when she does. She’s never cared to think of her own future.
“No, it didn’t,” Kozue says. “I did. Neither of us did. Weird fucking dreams that mean nothing.” She swirls her drink, in the dim lights of the bar and the glow of the alchohol, her hair looks gold. “But dreams are better than reality. I could kill that monster.”
“Don’t do that,” Nanami says. “Hating yourself, who does it help?”
“I know what I am,” Kozue says.
“Exactly,” Nanami says.
Kozue looks at her.
“It’s not fair you turned out perfect,” she says. Nanami scoffs.
She doesn’t remember the rest of the night.
She doesn’t dream, though.