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Keiwa rarely dreamt.
This was true ever since his childhood. That’s why he was so enthusiastic when he felt like his dream was so vivid, why he was inclined to share it with Sara, during that fateful day when he got mixed up in the DGP for the first time.
It just simply didn’t happen - the most he could usually talk about were vague flashes of memory, hard to grasp, harder to articulate.
Sara had nightmares, he remembered that. Especially after they had to bury their parents, and they thought it was just an accident—
Well.
Sara often would still smile the next day and tell him something to brush it all off.
“It’s okay.” She’d smile, despite her darkened eyes, “I called the baku to eat my nightmares.”
Monsters who eat your nightmares.
But be careful, because they might eat your hopes and dreams as well.
Because hopes and dreams like this, are precious, and risking it—
…
He had learnt about that the hard way, right?
And it never came without a price.
So do not call the monster to eat your nightmares.
And now, Keiwa would dream more and more often.
He’d dream of cheers.
Cheers echoing in the dark room, and he’d stand there. People would chant his name - his real name, his rider name, calling him Head, and they’d cheer for him.
A hand grabbed his ankle.
He looked down, and the ground was covered with blood, and the hand that grabbed him belonged to Michinaga, who climbed closer and closer, many cuts on his body, dragging his half-dead self across the floor, as he always would.
“Is this what you want?” Michinaga hissed, looking up at him, his face bloodied, eyes glowing an odd shade. “You and your bleeding heart. Is this worth it?”
“It has to be,” Keiwa heard himself say, as he yanked his foot away. “You of all people should understand that new things cannot be born, unless we destroy the old first.”
His feet connected with Michinaga’s body, and he disappeared in the darkness, the void swallowing him up, leaving Keiwa there with the disembodied cheers.
“It isn’t really wrong is it?”
They were renovating one of their rooms. Or rather, Keiwa was standing next to Michinaga, giving him whatever tools he asked for. Michinaga was quite… mellow like this. His hair tied up, in work clothes, making sure the walls were levelled out before it was time to paint them.
Which was now.
Time to paint them, that is.
“Huh?”
“We had to break things before we rebuilt it.”
“But what I did was—”
“I think all of us had done things we regret,” Michinaga interrupted him. He was crouching on the floor, and when he looked up at Keiwa, white paint on his face, for one, horrible moment, Keiwa remembered Michinaga in his dream, blood on his face only that part wasn’t a dream, was it, he remembered looking at Michinaga, bruised on the ground after he put him there.
And then, Michinaga continued, yanking Keiwa back from the memory.
“...some of us just did more things we regret than others.”
“How do you deal with it?”
Michinaga was silent, before he stood up, brushing off his gloved hands on his pants, which didn’t help the paint-everywhere situation.
“I do not run from it. What I have done will always follow me. The only thing I can do is to face it head on, when it comes back to haunt me.”
“...do you have nightmares?”
And Michinaga looked at him again, their eyes meeting.
“Just like you do.”
“...you know?”
“You aren’t subtle,” Michinaga snorted, putting a brush against Keiwa’s nose, and he felt the paint on his skin. “You are, in fact, not a great liar, Tycoon.”
He dreamt more, and not always about Michinaga.
In fact, his brain felt like doing more than enough to catch up with years and years of not having dreams.
He dreamt of Neon sometimes too.
Neon sitting on the floor of a warehouse, surrounded by bloodied white flowers and broken glass, her eyes not even looking up at Keiwa, as he stood over her.
“You can just go on.” Neon’s voice was hollow as she spoke, like a broken, old transmission glitching out, “There are other things for you to care about. And you wouldn’t care about me, would you?”
And Keiwa dreamt of his body moving and leaving her there.
He walked past her, not even looking back, broken glass crushed under his boots.
By the time he stopped and turned to look back at her, Neon was gone, only leaving the bloodied flower petals and glass shards behind.
He was helping Neon during one of her streams - she needed a team for a game she was streaming, so he was willing to join in, and he should have been participating, but he wasn’t great at keeping his spirits up. And honestly, he was kind of dragging Neon and the rest of the team down - they did need a fourth, and Sara and Sae were carrying alongside Neon, while Keiwa was just. Trying not to die.
It wasn’t going great.
Keiwa was also trying to not pay attention to the chat, because he wasn’t terribly popular today, but him leaving would force the stream to either end, or for them to figure out something new. He couldn’t do that.
Couldn’t abandon Neon again.
…this was getting ridiculous. This was not the same, it was not—
He got a private message.
He knew who messaged him even before looking down on his phone.
[Neon]: Are you ok? Do you need a break?
He glanced back at the stream, and Neon was great at keeping at the energy. She kept smiling and chatting and laughing, and still somehow found a way to message him.
[Keiwa]: No it’s okay, really. Sorry.
[Neon]: Don’t apologise! Let’s wrap this up quickly, okay?
Keiwa felt the guilt pierce his heart, thinking of the bloodied flowers in his dream, and his own words in his past. He sighed, getting himself together.
Once the stream was over, Neon was by his side, cuddling close to him, arms around him, and Keiwa wanted to apologise again, yet he couldn’t find his words.
So he just held her closer, and never wanted to let her go.
And of course—
Of course he would dream of Ace as well.
Ace suspended and tied up, on his knees with blood dripping down from the barbed wires wrapped around his wrists onto his white outfit.
And he smiled.
“Does this make you happy, Tycoon?” His voice was like an echo, his now-pale-blue eyes fixed on Keiwa.
“It will, if you fulfill my wish.”
“Wishes have a cost.”
“And you will pay them.”
“Is that another wish of yours, Tycoon?”
And sometimes, he’d stop talking in these nightmares. He would be wordless, unmoving white stone that was bleeding regardless, and Keiwa in his dreams screamed.
“You cannot disappear. You owe me a world that I wished for. You owe everyone to make things right— You—”
And then, he’d wake up.
He’d wake up, and choke on his own tears, and try to catch his breath, and then there was a hand on his forehead.
“It’s alright, Tycoon.”
Nobody else said his name quite the same way, and Keiwa immediately felt his body ease and relax, as he fell back back onto bed, trying to catch his breath.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Deep, deep breaths.
Ace’s hands were wiping Keiwa’s face of- tears? Sweat? He didn’t quite know.
“Why don’t you hate me?”
“We have been over this, haven’t we? You know the answer.”
“I hate me.”
“Then you hate yourself enough, you don’t need me adding onto it, do you?”
“You make everything sound so simple.”
“Things are never simple,” Ace said, his hands covering Keiwa’s face. When Keiwa opened his eyes, he saw Ace’s normal coloured eyes, “But all of this is about perseverance. Going on. Believing everyone can be happy.”
“Even if someone had done the things I have done?”
“It is not mine or anyone else’s place to decide that. The only one who can stand in your way of reaching happiness is you. But I hope you’ll allow yourself to be happy.”
Did he have the right?
Keiwa didn’t ask this question, because Ace would just say the same thing.
In an hour or so, Ace would be around in the kitchen, serving breakfast, beaming all smug and self-proclaimed-god-like (and one couldn’t exactly argue with that now, could they?), and he made it so easy to forget things just a bit.
Tsumuri was… not exactly avoiding him. But it was still like bulletproof glass was raised between them at all times.
Not that he could blame her.
She would also show up in his dreams at times - a statue, unmoving and vulnerable at the same time, looming over Keiwa. Often a tree was growing around it, and in the trunk of the tree, there was Sara, who would open her eyes, looking at him accusingly.
“If you cut me down, you can free her,” Sara’s voice rang, all hollow. “That is what you should do.”
And in his dreams, he’d scream and argue, until Sara’s whole body got swallowed up by the tree, until the tree grew all around the statue like a tree would grow around objects left there, the two of them becoming fully intervene together, and you couldn’t have taken them apart, unless you destroyed both.
Apologising to Tsumuri was not enough, and she had forgiven him, saying gently you did it to save your sister, but Keiwa choked on his own tears.
“I did it for me,” Keiwa heard himself say. “Because I couldn’t imagine living without my sister.”
And Tsumuri was silent, before sighing.
“And now you won’t have to.”
“Please—”
“If you are looking for punishment, you won’t find it with me,” Tsumuri interrupted him. “I am forgiving you. Let’s move on to create the world Ace wishes for.”
In some way, Tsumuri’s forgiveness was more cruel than anything else she could have done to him.
And sometimes, in his dreams, he would see his mirror.
His mirror looked just like him, a darker look in his eyes as he tilted his head forward, silently.
“I never wanted all of that.”
“I’m the one person you can never lie to,” his mirror sneered, “Because I am you. We both know what was going on there.”
“What now?”
“You know what now.” His mirror shrugged. “We live. And fight for a world where everyone can be happy. That’s what you decided on, no?”
“And what about you?”
“What about me? Didn’t you listen? I am you.”
These dreams were the weirdest.
But at least when he woke up, he didn’t feel like screaming, crying, or sick to his stomach.
So he’d wake up, climb out of bed, untangle himself from the mess of limbs, from Neon clinging to him, and try his best to not disturb Michinaga who was curled against the wall.
Maybe Ace would actually show up for breakfast again.
That sounded nice, didn’t it?