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“Yes: I am a dreamer.
For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight,
and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
- Oscar Wilde
The first time it happens, Derek is seven years old and having a nightmare.
He’s dreaming of the counselor his parents had made him see after the divorce, the mean one, the one who had pushed and pushed and pushed him to talk even after he’d started to cry and said he didn’t want to. He’s pushing in the dream, too, and finally, Derek, in his dream, thinks, with all of his might, I want my mom.
And then he’s not in his dream anymore. He’s somewhere else.
The somewhere else is warm and sunny, so bright he stumbles a little and blinks his eyes, still stinging with remembered tears. There’s sand, soft and hot between his toes, and he looks around, confused. This is a beach, but not a beach he recognizes.
He hears a laugh, sweet and musical and familiar, and turns toward it on instinct--that, he recognizes; that laugh is safety, is love, is home. “Ammi,” he says, immediately, and then falters.
It is his mother, but not his mother as he’s ever seen her. She’s in the water, surrounded by young women he doesn’t recognize. She’s young, too, her face lighter than he’s ever seen it, free of any lines, her hair loose and long and flying.
Her lips part, and the laugh fades from her eyes, replaced with confusion. “Ma,” she begins, and then she steps toward him, reaching. “Derek?”
He wakes up crying. A moment later, the door to his bedroom opens, and his mother is pulling him into her arms, his mama at her heels. “ ' ’Ant aman, hayiti,” she whispers into his hair, as he clutches at her shirt, confused and half-asleep. “You’re safe, you’re okay, I have you.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he says. “Ammi, I--”
“I know, my love, I know.” She kisses his head. “We’ll figure it out.”
It takes several strained phone calls to his father in English, followed by several very loud calls to his paternal grandmother in French. Derek sits on the living room couch with his mama, who sings softly to him in Spanish, carding her fingers through his hair, songs from her childhood in Chile. Farah’s awake now, too, and she perches on the arm of the couch, casting worried glances between Derek and their mother, pacing the dining room with the phone pressed to her ear.
Finally, they get an answer.
Dreamwalker.
His mother pries the information out of his grandmother like pulling teeth--later, when he’s older, Derek won’t be surprised when he thinks about this. His aristocratic, high-class grandmother, with her regal bearing and her constant, sharp “tiens toi droit, Derek”s, who never talks about the life she left behind in Haiti unless she’s pressed, whose own mother married into money, left her small town behind her and never looked back. Whose great-grandmother, apparently, was a manbo sur point, who spoke with the loa, who welcomed them into her dreams, and learned to walk between worlds.
Who opened a door, and didn’t close it again.
“So what do I do?” Derek says, what feels like hours later, as his mother tucks him back into bed. “How do I stay in my own head?”
“I don’t know, baby,” she says, smoothing his blankets. Her brow is furrowed with worry. He thinks about how young she looked in her dream, how happy. “I don’t know.”
The answer is:
He doesn’t.
At first it’s proximity. He falls into Farah’s dreams, most often--their bedrooms share a wall. If she finds it annoying, her clumsy little brother tumbling into her dreams as often as he topples into her side while they walk down the street, at least she’s kind about it. He tips into his mothers’ dreams, too, and finds that they dream of each other so often that sometimes it takes him a few moments to realize whose dream he’s in. Eventually, he learns to look for the language: Ammi dreams in Arabic, Mama dreams in Spanish.
But then, it starts to spread.
He realizes, as he gets older, that he can venture out further. Lupe in his fourth grade class tells him she’s having nightmares about her father, and he slips into her dream and holds her hand and stands between her and a tall man with cold eyes and glares, back straight and shoulders square, until he feels her stop shaking. His sixth grade teacher, everyone’s favorite, is out sick for two weeks, and he steps curiously into her room just to check on her. He finds her dreaming of a light-filled kitchen in the countryside, the sweet smell of fresh air on the wind. She resigns a week later, and takes a job in Hudson Valley. He’s the only one in the class not surprised.
So it’s not all bad, really.
In Andover, he learns to use it to his advantage. Psychological warfare is the currency here, and if Derek doesn’t have the right look to get away with that shit during daylight hours, he can at least do it at night. He knows who the worst of the bullies are, and all it takes is a slip into their dreams, a little manipulation, and he gets the satisfaction of dark circles under their eyes in the mornings.
His mom would be disappointed, he’s sure, but--it’s about survival, here.
By the time he makes it to Samwell, he knows what he’s doing. He knows how to focus on a person, slip into their dream, be seen if he wants to, stay hidden if he doesn’t. He knows how to manipulate, to turn a nightmare into a dream--the other way around, too. He knows how to wake himself up in an instant if he needs to disappear.
Still, the first time he winds up in one of Dex’s dreams, it’s a fucking surprise.
He hasn’t accidentally dream-walked since he was fourteen and high off his head, stumbling into Shitty’s when they’d fallen asleep after shotgunning their way through two blunts, which Jack Zimmermann can never, ever find out about. So when he’s wandering through the halls of the Riverside Library one moment and stepping out onto a rocky beach the next, he has a dizzying moment of confusion before he thinks, oh, fuck.
“Nursey?”
Derek winces, and turns. Dex is sitting on the sand, looking more relaxed than Derek’s ever seen him. He has a fishing net in his hands, knotted and tangled. “Hey,” he says. Calm. Chill.
“What,” Dex begins, and then he looks down at the net and huffs. “Jesus,” he says, and tosses it aside. “Not even a fucking metaphor anymore.”
Derek blinks. “What?”
Dex rolls his eyes and gets to his feet. He’s wearing loose jeans, cuffed to his ankles to keep them dry, and a white shirt, the first few buttons undone. It’s a stupidly good look on him, and Derek thinks oh, fuck, how did I not realize he’s hot. “Come on, you’re my subconscious, right?” He gestures to the net. “Working out the fucking knots? Dealing with the shit about how I feel about you?”
“How you feel about me,” Derek echoes, still confused, because as far as he’s seen, Dex’s feelings toward him are mostly annoyance, irritation, and barely-veiled dislike. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like you need me to tell you,” Dex says. His lip curls, a slow almost lazy smirk, and he takes another step forward. “C’mon, Nursey.”
And oh.
Derek panics, steps back, and flails himself into consciousness so hard he falls out of bed.
Dex avoids him for the next two days. Chowder and Bitty end up staging another intervention. It’s awkward for everyone.
He tries to stay in his own dreams after that. He also tries to avoid noticing how much more aware he is of the color of the flush on Dex’s cheeks when he gets mad, of the divot at the base of his collarbone when his flannels are open, of the cluster of freckles on the back of his left shoulder.
He does a decent job of the former, and a not-so-decent job of the latter, until late October, when they play Brown.
The game will be blurry, later, when he tries to remember it. He’ll recall the sweep of his skates, the rush of the crowd, but these are normal. He’ll be told he got an assist in the first period, but he won’t remember this at all. He won’t remember the crosscheck that sends him flying, or the impact of his head against the boards, at just the wrong angle. He won’t remember Dex’s terrified yell of his name as he hits the ice.
For a long time, there’s nothing.
And then:
The beach, again. But not his mother’s beach.
“Nursey?”
Derek blinks, slowly. He feels a little fuzzy, and looks left, and then right. Dex is staring at him, his eyes wide and worried. He’s sitting on the sand again, his net in his lap. His hair is windswept. He looks like he’s been crying. “Dex?”
Dex’s lips part, his brow furrowing in confusion. “You weren’t here a second ago.”
“I wasn’t anywhere a second ago,” Derek says. He sits down next to Dex on the sand and pulls part of the net into his lap. His fingers feel a little clumsy, and he puts it down again.
Dex laughs, a weak, wet sound. He pushes a shaky hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, Nursey, because that’s how dreams work. I thought about you, and now you’re here.”
“No, Dex, you don’t get it, I--” Derek cuts himself off with a frown. “You were thinking about me?”
“Of course I was thinking about you,” Dex says. He narrows his eyes. “You’re my subconscious, why wouldn’t you know that?”
“Um,” Derek says, guilty.
Dex, being Dex, and brilliant, stares at him, comprehension dawning. “Holy shit,” he says. “Holy shit. Nursey. Nursey, are you real?”
“Um,” Derek says again. Dex gapes. Derek gives up. “I dreamwalk,” he says, spreading his hands. “It’s, uh. Kind of my thing.”
“Oh.” Dex nods, slowly. He’s still staring. There’s something unreadable in his eyes. “Why--why my dream, though?”
Derek shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I meant what I said. I wasn’t anywhere a second ago. I--I was nowhere. And then I was here.”
Dex startles, looking suddenly alarmed. “Nursey,” he says. He reaches out and puts a hand on Derek’s arm, a little hesitantly, and then more firmly, when he realizes that they can touch. “Nursey, do you...Do you know where you are? For real?”
Derek frowns. “No?”
Dex’s lower lip trembles, and then he bites it. “You’re in the hospital,” he says. “You--You hit your head, really bad. In the game. You haven’t woken up yet.”
“Oh.” Derek tries to process that. His head feels a little slow, a little muddled. He looks out at the waves, washing slow and lazy up on the beach. He thinks maybe they could drag him out to sea if he looks too long, and squeezes his eyes shut.
Usually that wakes him up. Now, it doesn’t. He sucks in a breath. “Dex,” he says, fear prickling along his skin. “Dex, I...I can’t wake up.”
Dex tightens his grip on his arm. “Nursey,” he says. “Nursey, hey. Hey.” He brings his other hand up, touches Derek’s jaw, and the touch is so delicate that Derek’s breath leaves his lungs in a rush. “Nursey, it’s okay.”
“It isn’t,” Derek says, rapid-fire. “Dex, Dex, I can always wake up, I can always wake up, it’s the first thing I learned, I--”
Dex leans forward, and kisses him.
It’s a soft kiss. Sweet. Derek barely realizes it’s happening before Dex is pulling away. “What,” Derek whispers, confused and a little breathless.
Dex strokes a thumb over his cheekbone. “Wake up, Nursey,” he says quietly. “Wake up, and come back to me.”
He puts a hand in the middle of Derek’s chest, and he pushes.
Derek opens his eyes, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
The room is bright, bright, in the way that only hospital rooms ever are. His head hurts, sharp and stinging along his right temple, dull and achey everywhere else. He takes in a soft, shaking breath, trying not to groan, and looks carefully around the room.
It’s quiet, save for the soft beeping of the monitor attached to the clip on his right forefinger. And empty, save for Will Poindexter, fast asleep in the chair next to his bed, slumped halfway across Derek’s legs. His right hand is curled around Derek’s left. Warm. A steady heartbeat.
Derek swallows, winces around his dry throat. He squeezes Dex’s hand, and rasps, “Will?”
Dex mumbles something, squeezing back. Derek squeezes again, more pointed this time, and Dex startles into a seated position. “Nursey,” he gasps, eyes wide. “Nursey! Nursey, oh my god, you’re awake, holy shit, you’re--”
He’s loud, and Derek grimaces. Dex immediately quiets. “Sorry,” he says, much softer. “Sorry, sorry--Nursey, I just…” And then he falters, suddenly, staring at Derek like he’s never seen him before. “Nursey, this is gonna sound so weird,” he says. “But I swear to God, I was just dreaming about you.”
Derek licks his dry lips, and reaches out with his other hand, the one with the monitor clipped to his finger, careful of the wires. He touches Dex’s cheek, the same way Dex had touched his. “I know,” he says. “We were on the beach.”
He takes a breath. “You kissed me,” he says, and then throws caution to the wind. “You woke me up.”
Dex stares. “Nursey,” he says. Uncertainty all over his features.
It might be the concussion, but Derek can’t help thinking he sees an ocean sunset in his eyes. “It was a good dream,” Derek says, not letting him go. “Right?”
Dex opens his mouth, and then he lets out a slow breath, sitting down on the edge of Derek’s bed. He leans down and presses the lightest of kisses to Derek’s forehead. “Yeah. A really good dream,” he says. “A really, really good dream.”
Derek smiles. “Yeah,” he says. He still feels floaty, but tethered, now. Safe. “I thought so, too.”