The Storyteller and the Skeptic
The aftermath of the gym incident settled into a new, fragile status quo. The toxic cloud of fear around Hitoshi Shinso didn't vanish, but it dissipated, replaced by a cautious, bewildered neutrality. He was left alone, which was a significant improvement from being actively shunned. He seemed to regard this change with deep suspicion, as if it were a trick, a lull before a storm he was sure would return. His dreamscape remained a fortified keep, but the air around it felt less besieged.
And he started watching me.
It was subtle. A glance across the classroom while the teacher droned on about pre-Quirk history. A moment of eye contact in the hallway, his purple eyes narrowed in that same, puzzled frown I'd seen before. I was the only other outlier, the only other variable in the predictable equation of our class. The quiet had apparently called out to the quiet.
I didn't approach him. My social skills, honed in the court of dreams and the company of anxious parents, were ill-suited for forging connections with prickly, traumatized nine-year-olds. But I didn't avoid his gaze either. I met it with a calm neutrality I'd practiced in the mirror of my own realm.
This strange, silent dance continued for weeks. Then, one rain-soaked afternoon, it broke.
I was in the school library, my preferred sanctuary. It was a small, dusty room that smelled of old paper and peace. I was tucked into my usual corner, a book of illustrated Greek myths open on the table. I was looking at a picture of Morpheus, the god of dreams, and feeling a strange, hollow ache. Was he just a story? Or was there a tiny, distorted piece of truth in it? The question had started as a whisper in the back of my mind, growing a little louder each day.
The chair opposite me scraped back. Shinso stood there, his hair damp from the rain, his school bag slung over one shoulder. He didn't say anything. He just sat down, pulled out a math workbook, and opened it, pointedly not looking at me.
The silence stretched, thick and awkward. This wasn't the comfortable quiet of the library. This was a confrontation of non-communication.
After five minutes, he spoke, his voice low, aimed at his textbook. "You don't talk much."
I looked up from my drawing of a many-legged dream creature. "You either."
He flicked his eyes toward me, then back down. "When I talk, bad stuff happens."
I considered the page of my book. "My mom says it's good to listen more than you talk."
He snorted, a short, humorless sound. "Easy for her to say. She can probably talk without… without…" He trailed off, his jaw tightening.
"Without people being scared?" I finished quietly.
He looked at me then, a real look, his guard down for a split second. It was full of a loneliness so deep it was like looking into a well. "Yeah."
I went back to my drawing. "I'm not scared."
He was silent for a minute. I could feel him studying me, trying to figure me out. "Why not? Everyone is. Even the teachers."
I shrugged, keeping my focus on my pencil. "Seems like you're more scared of it than anyone else is."
The words hung in the air. It was a risky thing to say. I half-expected him to get up and leave. Instead, he let out a long, slow breath. It sounded like he'd been holding it for years.
"They all think I'm gonna be a villain," he muttered, the words sounding worn out, like he'd said them to himself a thousand times.
"Do you want to be a villain?" I asked.
"No!" The word burst out of him, too loud for the library. He flinched and lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. "No. I want to be a hero. More than anything." He said it like a secret, like a wish he wasn't supposed to have.
I finally looked up and met his eyes. "So why can't you?"
He stared at me like I'd just asked why water wasn't dry. "Because of this!" he hissed, gesturing vaguely at his own throat. "My Quirk! It's… it's a villain's Quirk. It's for making people do stuff, not for saving them."
I thought about that. I thought about the heroes in the dreams I tended, their fears and their drills. "What about that guy, the one who talks to animals? He makes them do stuff. Help people."
"That's different," Shinso said, but he sounded less sure.
"Is it?" I asked. "What if you made a villain walk right into the police station? Or tell you where they hid a bomb? You wouldn't have to fight them. No one would get hurt."
He was completely still, just staring at me. His workbook was forgotten. The idea had clearly never been presented to him. His entire world had been spent defending the indefensibility of his power, not exploring what it could do.
"They'd… they'd still call me a villain for using it," he said, but the protest was weak.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe they'd call you smart."
A ghost of something—not a smile, but a flicker of life—passed over his face. He looked down at his hands. "No one's ever talked like that before."
"Maybe no one ever thought about it before," I said.
That was the beginning of a strange, fractured friendship. We never talked about personal things. We never went to each other's houses. But in the library, during lunch sometimes, we would sit together. The silence between us was no longer hostile. It was… shared. We were two kids who didn't fit, and that was a thing we had in common. He would sometimes grumble about our classmates or a stupid homework assignment, and I would listen. It was a novelty for both of us.
His dreamscape began to change. The walls didn't come down, but a single, narrow gate appeared. I would sometimes stand outside it in the Dreaming, and I could feel him on the other side, less lonely than before. I never entered. That gate was his to open.
My own power continued to evolve. In the Dreaming, my control was now effortless. I could hold the entire tapestry of the city's dreams in my awareness, a symphony I conducted with a thought. I had learned to create simple dream-servants—librarians for the endless shelves, gardeners for the silver-moss plains. They were extensions of my will, capable of performing routine maintenance, allowing me to focus on more nuanced work.
In the waking world, my ability to "suggest" to objects had become second nature. Walking to school, I could suggest a loose cobblestone dream of stability. In art class, I could suggest the watercolors dream of flowing just right. The cost was now a faint drain I barely noticed.
I had also grown more adept at influencing the collective unconscious without direct commands. During a week of tense exams, I encouraged the city to dream of quiet libraries, lowering the ambient anxiety. After a storm, I nurtured dreams of rebuilding. I was a mood ring for the subconscious of a million people.
But the question of others like me persisted. It wasn't a search for family. It was a simpler, more childlike curiosity. Was I the only one who could do this? Was there anyone else who knew what it was like? My research, both waking and dreaming, was frustrating. I found myths and fairy tales, but they were just stories. There was no evidence.
One night, deep in the oldest section of my library, I found a book that was different. It wasn't a book of dreams, but a book about dreams. And it was written in a language of symbols and concepts that felt like home. I could read it because it was written in the native language of the Dreaming itself.
The pictures weren't of people, but of… feelings. A raging, beautiful storm for something called Change. A perfect, complicated knot for something called Destiny. A silent, black hole for something called Ending. The book didn't say they were people. It said they were places. Important places that had to exist for the world to work. And my place, the Dreaming, was one of them.
It was like finding a map of the world and seeing my house labeled as a major country. It was scary and huge and too much for my nine-year-old brain to fully understand. The book ended with a feeling, not words: a sense of a rule. A warning to stay in my own yard. That messing with the other places was dangerous.
I closed the book, my head buzzing. So the world was bigger and weirder than I thought. But I was still alone in my… job. The thought was lonely, but also a relief. I didn't have to find anyone. I just had to do my work.
The following week, our class took a field trip to the Mustafu Museum of Hero History. The other children were electric with excitement, buzzing from display to display.
Shinso and I drifted to the back of the group. We ended up in a quieter wing with old, boring-looking exhibits. One display caught my eye. It was a glass case with a small, handwritten journal. The placard read: "Dr. Akihiro Sato: Early Theories on Quirks and Dreams."
I felt a jolt. Sato. Akari's surname. The girl I had helped years ago.
I stepped closer. Dr. Sato had thought Quirks might be connected to what people dreamed about. That maybe the things humans had always wished for were finally coming true.
Standing there, I felt a strange, cold certainty. He was close, but he had it backward. He thought the waking world was influencing dreams. But what if it was the other way around? What if the dreams were… leaking? The idea was too big, too weird. It made my head feel swimmy.
"This is so boring."
Shinso's voice broke my reverie. He was standing beside me, looking utterly unimpressed.
"It's kinda interesting," I said, my voice faint.
"An old guy's diary? Yeah, thrilling." He kicked lightly at the leg of the display case. "Come on. I heard they have a replica of Captain Celebrity's first costume in the next room. It's probably got way more glitter in real life."
I took one last look at the journal. The entire museum, the heroes, the Quirks… was it all because of my realm? Was it because of me?
The thought was so huge and terrifying I had to shove it away. I couldn't think about it. Not yet.
"Yeah," I said, turning to follow him. "Okay."
We walked toward the noise and the glitter, two quiet boys surrounded by the loud, bright evidence of a world built on a secret they couldn't even begin to imagine. One of them was starting to guess.
.
.
.
(Just came back to college a week ago so it's been a little hectic for me, will try and get more chapters out more, hopefully very soon)