[Fic] Dreams and Realities, chapter one.
TITLE: Dreams and Realities, chapter one (of four)
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: This story is complete, but I will be posting it in installments as it's currently undergoing rewriting of a couple of things I wasn't very satisfied with, along with typo corrections and such. You can expect pretty quick postage, though, since it's really very little that I'm changing. Many thanks to my betas Beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their encouragement and thorough corrections; if you like how this is written, it's probably because of them.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Dreams and Realities
“When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.”
Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara.
In his small, very neat apartment, Watanuki Kimihiro was dreaming.
This wasn’t new to him. He often dreamt. He dreamt of strange things, visited strange places in his dreams and met strange people there. That such things happened in his dreams didn’t really surprise him. After all, even awake he went through strange things, visited strange places and met strange people there. By now, he wasn’t even surprised when his dreams turned out to be a bit more real than any other person’s... quite literally more real. It wasn’t everybody, he mused, who was able to pull things out of a dream, or leave things inside one. Take his glasses, for example. Their disappearance had freaked him out at first, but he now came to accept it as normal. As normal as his life was ever going to be, which wasn’t very, to say the least.
That is why he wasn’t really surprised when he started dreaming that night, even though said dream was slightly different than the rest.
It was a weird dream, but not an unpleasant one...quite the contrary, in fact. If he could have thought rationally about it, he would have been rather happy to realize that this, for once, was a perfectly normal dream to have while being a hormonally charged teenager.
Unfortunately, the very nature of this particular dream didn’t really leave him in a disposition to think rationally.
Skin. Heat. Hands. Skin. Lips. Oh, those lips.
He didn’t really question who was there with him in this particular dream; in fact, he didn’t really question anything at all. But really, who could blame him?
Skin. Lips. Hands, wandering hands. Lower. There.
A gasp. A moan. Inside, he was inside. Friction, delicious friction. Heat. Heat.
Lips. Hands. Skin, such delicious skin. Moans, such delicious moans. Heat. Skin. Friction. There, almost there. Faster. Harder. More.
Watanuki awoke with a shudder, and for once, it wasn’t a shudder of fear, or sorrow, or even surprise. It was a shudder of pure, raw, pleasure.
He lay there, still, on top of his futon, trying to will his breathing back to normal, trying not to think of who had been there with him in this particular dream. Because now that he was awake, and the waves of pleasure were starting to ebb, the need to question was beginning to surface.
It wasn’t the first time he had had a dream such as this one, really. After all, he was a perfectly healthy teenage boy... most of the time, at least. Feeling sick or passing out from the evil presence of some ayakashi or other didn’t happen very often anymore. He didn’t stupidly risk his life without thinking of the consequences as much as before, either. It was another who did the stupidly-risking-his-life thing now. But he was pretty sure this was the most realistic dream of this nature he had ever been in, not to mention the most intense.
He could feel a blush creep up his neck and reach all the way to his ears when he recalled some fragments of his dream. Try as he might, he could not deny that some of those fragments were a bit different from previous, similar dreams. Particularly the ones that hinted as to who exactly had been there with him in this particular dream.
He slapped himself mentally. He also slapped himself physically, for good measure. He was not going to think about it. After all, he was going to have to see this particular person in -he squinted at his alarm clock next to his futon- a couple of hours, and if he thought about it, he may start to feel the need to do something about it. And he would rather have danced naked in a demon parade on a full moon with a sign hanging on his back saying “eat me” than done something about this particular dream with this particular person.
Instead, he concentrated on other matters at hand. Glad that this wasn’t one of those nights when he was staying at Yuuko’s, he lifted the covers to assess the damage done to his sheets, only to find that there wasn’t any.
Where did it go?
In his bedroom on a Buddhist temple not too far from there, Doumeki Shizuka was also inspecting his sheets, but reaching an entirely different conclusion.
That certainly is an unusually big mess.
Doumeki Shizuka was no stranger to pain.
In fact, he had grown up feeling all sorts of different aches and pains. When he was little, he used to get sick frequently. Training with the bow gave him blisters that sometimes bled, and when he was a beginner he often nipped his ear and cheek with the string. Once, he had accidentally been shot in the leg because of a clumsy accident during practice. It hadn’t been his arrow, but it had still hurt.
After meeting a certain bespectacled boy, his aches and pains had actually increased. Having his arm almost maimed by a spirit he couldn’t even see, having to stand waiting for ten hours in the rain, catching a stiletto cutter barehanded, losing half the sight in his right eye, losing almost a third of his blood to keep the damn boy alive, gave him a certain familiarity with pain that, while not welcomed, at least made its presence bearable.
But now he was sore.
He was not very sure how to deal with that. Particularly considering where he was feeling sore, and that he couldn’t think of any activity the day before that could have led to his feeling sore there.
Doumeki wasn’t one to speculate. He was of the firm opinion that whatever he needed to know, he would eventually find out without having to go out of his way looking for answers. He would much rather focus on the things he could do about any given situation than waste time questioning how things got to be that way in the first place.
What he could do now was wash the sheets in the bathroom before his mother started asking questions. Not that he would bother lying. In his opinion, there was nothing to hide. He was a perfectly healthy teenage boy, after all. He was bound to have one or two dreams like that every once in a while. He wasn’t particularly bothered by who had appeared in his dream, or exactly what had happened in it, or the role he had played in that dream. It was just a dream, after all, albeit an enjoyable one.
But still, there was something at the back of his mind that whispered that maybe, just maybe, something wasn’t quite the same with this dream as with the others. Something that had to do with the inexplicably big mess on his sheets and the strange soreness he felt.
Something that had to do with what he thought he glimpsed as he finished washing his sheets and he passed the bathroom mirror on his way out.
He stopped, backtracked and stared.
Is that a hickey?
And thus ends chapter one.
Click here to go on to chapter two
Please remember to feed the plot bunnies! Your comments are good nourishment for them. :3
Glossary and cultural notes:
Ayakashi: demons, evil spirits, the sort. Although this term originally refers to a "ghost appearing at sea during a shripwreck" (according to the ever-faithful and all-knowing Wikipedia), it seems to acquire a broader meaning in xXxholic, which is the one I'm using. For some reason I like the Japanese word better than any English equivalents.
Futon: a roll-up mattress, pretty comfy and useful if you lack space, although some Japanese people use them only because it’s traditional.
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: This story is complete, but I will be posting it in installments as it's currently undergoing rewriting of a couple of things I wasn't very satisfied with, along with typo corrections and such. You can expect pretty quick postage, though, since it's really very little that I'm changing. Many thanks to my betas Beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their encouragement and thorough corrections; if you like how this is written, it's probably because of them.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Dreams and Realities
“When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.”
Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara.
In his small, very neat apartment, Watanuki Kimihiro was dreaming.
This wasn’t new to him. He often dreamt. He dreamt of strange things, visited strange places in his dreams and met strange people there. That such things happened in his dreams didn’t really surprise him. After all, even awake he went through strange things, visited strange places and met strange people there. By now, he wasn’t even surprised when his dreams turned out to be a bit more real than any other person’s... quite literally more real. It wasn’t everybody, he mused, who was able to pull things out of a dream, or leave things inside one. Take his glasses, for example. Their disappearance had freaked him out at first, but he now came to accept it as normal. As normal as his life was ever going to be, which wasn’t very, to say the least.
That is why he wasn’t really surprised when he started dreaming that night, even though said dream was slightly different than the rest.
It was a weird dream, but not an unpleasant one...quite the contrary, in fact. If he could have thought rationally about it, he would have been rather happy to realize that this, for once, was a perfectly normal dream to have while being a hormonally charged teenager.
Unfortunately, the very nature of this particular dream didn’t really leave him in a disposition to think rationally.
Skin. Heat. Hands. Skin. Lips. Oh, those lips.
He didn’t really question who was there with him in this particular dream; in fact, he didn’t really question anything at all. But really, who could blame him?
Skin. Lips. Hands, wandering hands. Lower. There.
A gasp. A moan. Inside, he was inside. Friction, delicious friction. Heat. Heat.
Lips. Hands. Skin, such delicious skin. Moans, such delicious moans. Heat. Skin. Friction. There, almost there. Faster. Harder. More.
Watanuki awoke with a shudder, and for once, it wasn’t a shudder of fear, or sorrow, or even surprise. It was a shudder of pure, raw, pleasure.
He lay there, still, on top of his futon, trying to will his breathing back to normal, trying not to think of who had been there with him in this particular dream. Because now that he was awake, and the waves of pleasure were starting to ebb, the need to question was beginning to surface.
It wasn’t the first time he had had a dream such as this one, really. After all, he was a perfectly healthy teenage boy... most of the time, at least. Feeling sick or passing out from the evil presence of some ayakashi or other didn’t happen very often anymore. He didn’t stupidly risk his life without thinking of the consequences as much as before, either. It was another who did the stupidly-risking-his-life thing now. But he was pretty sure this was the most realistic dream of this nature he had ever been in, not to mention the most intense.
He could feel a blush creep up his neck and reach all the way to his ears when he recalled some fragments of his dream. Try as he might, he could not deny that some of those fragments were a bit different from previous, similar dreams. Particularly the ones that hinted as to who exactly had been there with him in this particular dream.
He slapped himself mentally. He also slapped himself physically, for good measure. He was not going to think about it. After all, he was going to have to see this particular person in -he squinted at his alarm clock next to his futon- a couple of hours, and if he thought about it, he may start to feel the need to do something about it. And he would rather have danced naked in a demon parade on a full moon with a sign hanging on his back saying “eat me” than done something about this particular dream with this particular person.
Instead, he concentrated on other matters at hand. Glad that this wasn’t one of those nights when he was staying at Yuuko’s, he lifted the covers to assess the damage done to his sheets, only to find that there wasn’t any.
Where did it go?
In his bedroom on a Buddhist temple not too far from there, Doumeki Shizuka was also inspecting his sheets, but reaching an entirely different conclusion.
That certainly is an unusually big mess.
Doumeki Shizuka was no stranger to pain.
In fact, he had grown up feeling all sorts of different aches and pains. When he was little, he used to get sick frequently. Training with the bow gave him blisters that sometimes bled, and when he was a beginner he often nipped his ear and cheek with the string. Once, he had accidentally been shot in the leg because of a clumsy accident during practice. It hadn’t been his arrow, but it had still hurt.
After meeting a certain bespectacled boy, his aches and pains had actually increased. Having his arm almost maimed by a spirit he couldn’t even see, having to stand waiting for ten hours in the rain, catching a stiletto cutter barehanded, losing half the sight in his right eye, losing almost a third of his blood to keep the damn boy alive, gave him a certain familiarity with pain that, while not welcomed, at least made its presence bearable.
But now he was sore.
He was not very sure how to deal with that. Particularly considering where he was feeling sore, and that he couldn’t think of any activity the day before that could have led to his feeling sore there.
Doumeki wasn’t one to speculate. He was of the firm opinion that whatever he needed to know, he would eventually find out without having to go out of his way looking for answers. He would much rather focus on the things he could do about any given situation than waste time questioning how things got to be that way in the first place.
What he could do now was wash the sheets in the bathroom before his mother started asking questions. Not that he would bother lying. In his opinion, there was nothing to hide. He was a perfectly healthy teenage boy, after all. He was bound to have one or two dreams like that every once in a while. He wasn’t particularly bothered by who had appeared in his dream, or exactly what had happened in it, or the role he had played in that dream. It was just a dream, after all, albeit an enjoyable one.
But still, there was something at the back of his mind that whispered that maybe, just maybe, something wasn’t quite the same with this dream as with the others. Something that had to do with the inexplicably big mess on his sheets and the strange soreness he felt.
Something that had to do with what he thought he glimpsed as he finished washing his sheets and he passed the bathroom mirror on his way out.
He stopped, backtracked and stared.
Is that a hickey?
And thus ends chapter one.
Click here to go on to chapter two
Please remember to feed the plot bunnies! Your comments are good nourishment for them. :3
Glossary and cultural notes:
Ayakashi: demons, evil spirits, the sort. Although this term originally refers to a "ghost appearing at sea during a shripwreck" (according to the ever-faithful and all-knowing Wikipedia), it seems to acquire a broader meaning in xXxholic, which is the one I'm using. For some reason I like the Japanese word better than any English equivalents.
Futon: a roll-up mattress, pretty comfy and useful if you lack space, although some Japanese people use them only because it’s traditional.