[Dream] Week 10, Day 1
There's a dozen names you'll answer to, not one of them real. You don't even recognize the real one anymore, except by how your stomach clenches if you hear it.
It's Wammy's House and not, as if the set designer for your dreams is lazy, and fudged some of the details. The big tree you used to sit (hide) under is in the wrong place; the house itself is too big, and looks crooked from certain angles. There's a forest gone wild where the football pitch ought to be. Sometimes you're lost in it. Not this time.
You're eleven, and you've lived in fourteen places already. They give you garbage bags to put your stuff in. You're clutching one still, afraid to put it down, in this new place where they call you Matt. You guess it's better than 'hey kid.'
One of the bigger boys shoves past you, knocking you into the dirt. Your bag falls open, and all your clothes, books, games, all of it... just blows away.
You're seventeen, and they call you Mac, but you're going to have to change it soon. You're getting a reputation, and good or bad doesn't matter, the point is that you're 'the guy' now, the guy to contact, through a hedge of proxies and forwarders and obfuscators, when there's a system that needs cracking with no questions asked. So you're wiping drives, shredding shit, and the walls that shield you start a slow slide into decay, getting pixelated, then dissolving, like a bad wipe, and you'd laugh, except you can't move. You're next. Your hands are already going numb.
Driving, driving, so fast the neon blurs, the kanji you can't read very well anyway slurring together into half-apprehended, meaningless syllables. You're almost twenty, and you've been here before, but the streets stretch and distort, sprouting blind alleys, flinging up in your path ramps to nowhere. They close in, and you have to slow, reverse, pull off a five-point turn. You're hemmed in, the city itself is against you.
You get out. What else can you do? The cigarette hanging off your lip helps, a little. You stuff your hands in your pockets and walk along puffing on it without using them, a trick you used to be smug about, but it's cold comfort here.
There's a radio broadcasting somewhere. Amid crackles and static, you can make out a special report: "The identity of the attacker is still unknown."
A woman's laugh comes through loud and clear. "That's because he's nobody. He's always been nobody."
That's not true! you think. I made a difference! You don't believe it yourself, because you don't know.
There's a sound like a subway train coming, a rattle of trash and paper blowing; the edges of the bricks on the building closest to you lift. The city's all paper, and it's blowing away. There's nothing but black behind it.
It's not real.
None of it was ever real.
[Matt's awake in the darkness, but doesn't move. He's mentally pulling back pieces of himself, still half-convinced they're drifting away. He knows it was a dream, but the feeling's not easy to shake: that with a puff of wind from somewhere, it would all fall apart to reveal the nothingness at the root of it all. It'll be a little while before he feels anchored again. His hand closes around the Hitomi, blotting out the screen, and he stuffs the thing under his pillow.]