The exhaustion crushed me faster than I expected. My body, still humming with shame and sticky discomfort, betrayed me once again. The moment my cheek touched the damp pillow, the weight of it all dragged me under. My eyes closed, and the world twisted into darkness.
I floated. Not as myself, not even as Nobita. Something else. A shape without a body, a cloud of dark smoke that drifted through the void. My fingers, my arms, my legs were gone, yet I still felt them, hollow outlines dissolved into mist. My thoughts echoed louder in this strange space, deep and endless, like my skull had been pried open and the contents scattered into the black.
Then I heard it.
A faint sobbing. High-pitched, wavering, the kind of sound that claws at your chest before you even know why. The darkness rippled with the sound, pulling me toward it like a current. My smoke-shape twisted and flowed, and I drifted forward, searching.
There he was.
A boy, small and hunched on the floor of nothing, his round cheeks streaked with tears, glasses fogged, shoulders shaking. His knees were drawn to his chest, his little hands clutched tight together. He looked so fragile I thought the black void itself might swallow him whole.
I drifted closer and froze.
It was Nobita.
Not the Nobita I wore like skin, not the numbers and HUD pressing into my head, but the real one. The real Nobita, curled up and crying in a dream of his own.
"No one cares about me…" he whispered between sobs, his voice ragged, small. "They laugh at me… they always laugh. Even Mama… she embarrasses me in front of everyone. Doraemon doesn't listen anymore. He doesn't even try to help me. I'm nothing. I'm nothing but a joke."
The words sliced through me. I reached out instinctively, my smoke-body forming the vague shape of an arm, a hand stretching toward him. My mist curled around his small form, and for a moment I thought it would pass right through. But no.
Our hands touched.
Warmth. Real warmth. His tiny hand gripped mine desperately, clinging to it like a lifeline. His sobbing eyes rose to meet me, wide and pleading through the fog of tears.
"What do I do?" he asked, his voice trembling, raw. "What do I do? Please… tell me."
Something stirred inside me then, deep and dangerous. I looked down at him, my smoke swirling darker, thicker, coiling like a living storm. Words slipped from me before I even thought of them, heavy and certain.
"I'll teach them a lesson for you."
Nobita blinked, confusion mixing with fear. His small fingers tightened around mine. "A lesson…?"
I leaned closer, my voice dropping low, almost a growl. "They laugh at you. They step on you. They ignore you. Even your family… even Doraemon. But I won't. I'll make them understand. I'll make them value you the only way they'll learn."
His lip trembled, his voice breaking as he asked the question I knew was coming. "Are you going to do… those bad things? The things you… imagined?"
The void seemed to pulse at his words, my smoke coiling tighter, pressing heavier against the edges of the black. My cock throbbed faintly even here, in this dream-body without flesh, memory of arousal clinging like an infection.
I laughed quietly, the sound rough and cruel, echoing through the emptiness. "If you don't stop me, I'll be doing that. Every single one of them. The things you're too scared to even think. I'll make them regret treating you like nothing."
Nobita shook his head quickly, tears spilling faster. "No… no, you can't…!"
I lowered myself until my smoky, shapeless face was almost pressed against his, my voice curling around him like a whisper and a threat at once. "So are you going to stop me, twerp?"
He flinched at the word, but his hand still clung to mine, trembling, caught between desperation and terror. The void held its breath around us, the black stretching wide and endless, waiting for his answer.
I loomed darker, thicker, swallowing more of the dream. "Because if you don't… I'll show them all what it means to laugh at Nobita Nobi."