#which is almost certainly not how it works but? i wanted yusaku to meet astral | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kuriboo · 3 years

Text

Hugsaku 2021

Day 3 - Things You Said in a Dream | Three Things | Favorite Food | “Oh no I seem to have fallen on top of you and now am too lazy to move. What a tragedy.”

For Hugsaku 2021, I’ve been writing a continuous story with the prompts from each day. The general story is: Yusaku ends up in Heartland with no idea how he got there and Yuma decides try to help Yusaku get home. If you’d like to read the story so far, it’s available in either my previous posts or on ao3. I’ll link to the story on ao3 in the notes.

I ended up using four different prompts for this part, which was more than I expected I’d be using when I first started writing it. I don’t think I ever used this many prompts in future parts, but it ended up working very well for this one. I hpoe you enjoy!

Yusaku woke up screaming.

When his eyes were closed, all he could see was a completely white room. All he could remember was the duels he was constantly forced to go through, all he could feel was desperation, the pain and punishment that came with losing. He couldn’t breathe. Now he was awake and he didn’t recognize anything in the room around him. That only made him feel worse. Where was he? He couldn’t calm down, he couldn’t breathe.

A face floated in front of his. He didn’t recognize it. The face glowed white, with different colored eyes. “Is he sick again?” the face asked. “He doesn’t look good.”

Yusaku screamed again and scooted back on the floor, away from the stranger. This wasn’t home. Why wasn’t he home?

“What’s going on?” A different voice, off to the side. Another face entered Yusaku’s field of vision. He recognized this one: Yuma. Yuma looked towards the stranger.

“He woke up and kept screaming,” the stranger reported. “He did say he gets nightmares. For a second, though, it appeared he was looking directly at me, as if he could see me. Then he screamed again.”

“That’s silly, no one else can see you,” Yuma muttered. He looked at Yusaku. “It must have been a nightmare? But, um, I don’t know what to do?” His voice got louder . “I should do something, right??”

Yusaku’s heart was racing. Breathing was difficult. He felt like Yuma and the stranger were several rooms away. But slowly, his mind started working again. This was Yuma’s room. Yuma was letting him stay here. He’d been dreaming before. The incident was in the past. He had to pull himself out of it.

“Three reasons,” Yusaku managed to get out, “to keep going.” He looked down at his hands. Shakily, he held up a finger. “We need to save Kolter’s brother. We have to help him.” Another. “Ai and Kolter don’t know where I am.” Another. “There’s still a chance… I can get back to Den City.” With each reason, he calmed down a little bit. Breathing got easier. The world around him felt more real. He forced himself to take deep breaths. He took in the scene around him.

Yuma was crouched on the floor next to him. That stranger Yusaku had seen before was real, apparently, and still there. The floating was real, too, so apparently whoever this was could just float in the air, which was weird. Yusaku could feel how sweaty he was. The blankets and the sleeping bag he must’ve thrown off himself in his sleep, because he didn’t feel any different now than he had before he backed away. No difference in the amount of weight on him or how warm he was. It was dark, probably the middle of the night. Yuma looked tired, but still concerned. Yusaku felt bad for waking him.

Yusaku rubbed the back of his neck, feeling itchy. “It’s nothing,” he told Yuma. “Just a nightmare. I get them all the time. Don’t worry about it.”

“Of course I’m worried about it!” Yuma shot back. “‘Just’ a nightmare? You don’t look good at all, for a moment you looked more like a cornered wild animal or something than someone who just woke up. You looked scared. You shouldn’t have to feel scared.”

“Doesn’t matter if I should or not. It’s just the way it is.” Yusaku shrugged. Whatever was ideal meant nothing compared to reality. “I’m probably just not used to waking up in your room. This happened multiple times after I moved to my apartment. It’s nothing.”

“It’s something all right.” Yuma sighed. “What kind of nightmares are you even getting that you’re reacting this badly to them?”

“Real world experience. From the past.”

“What happened?”

Yusaku looked away. As a rule, he didn’t talk to anyone about the Lost Incident besides people that were involved and understood, like Kolter, or Ai. Yusaku didn’t open up to people. He generally avoided interacting with people at all. Nobody uninvolved could really understand. Plus, now he had his identity as Playmaker to worry about. Opening up to people, connecting himself to the Lost Incident, it ran the risk of someone figuring out who he was. And Playmaker needed to be anonymous. Playmaker was a criminal. Yusaku couldn’t keep doing what he was doing if the wrong person figured him out, and anyone could be that wrong person.

But here, in Heartland City, the Lost Incident didn’t exist. It never happened. Yusaku didn’t exist, and neither did Playmaker. So discussing the Lost Incident couldn’t possibly get him in trouble here. He looked at Yuma again. Something told him that Yuma might not understand, but he’d at least try. At least, he wouldn’t judge Yusaku badly. Usually opening up backfired for Yusaku, but maybe this time it wouldn’t.

“I was kidnapped when I was 6.” With those words out, Yusaku couldn’t stop, so he kept going. He didn’t look at Yuma as he explained what happened, but out of the corner of the eye he could see the stranger floating above them. The stranger didn’t seem judgemental, though, they just looked down at him and listened with a curious expression on their face. “After a few months, we were found and rescued,” Yusaku finished. “But I still have nightmares about it 10 years later. I’ve never really been able to move on.”

“That’s awful.” Yuma teared up. “I’m sorry something like that happened. If I was there, I’d…”

“You would have been way too young to do anything about it if you were even alive then,” Yusaku pointed out.

“Hey, I would have been 1!!” Yuma puffed out his cheeks. “Who cares how old I was, I would’ve done something no matter what! Age means nothing if I’m feeling the flow.”

“Whatever.” Yusaku rolled his eyes. “What’s done is done. It doesn’t matter either way.”

“Of course it matters,” Yuma protested. “If you have nightmares about it and it still hurts you, then it matters, because you matter. Well, in this case, there’s only one thing to do.” Yuma collapsed on the floor next to Yusaku.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh no, it looks like I’ve accidentally fallen on top of you, and now I’m too lazy to move. Guess I’m stuck here all night. Maybe you’ll sleep better if I’m here next to you.”

Yuma wrapped his arms around Yusaku in a hug, further cementing the fact that he was really going to stay there all night.

Yusaku sighed. He wasn’t going to be able to push Yuma away from him, and even if he did he knew by now that Yuma would just come back. He might as well live with it.

Still, something was bothering him. He pointed up at the stranger above them. “Do you know who that is?”

Yuma looked from Yusaku, to the stranger, then back to Yusaku, then to the stranger again. “Wait, you can see Astral??”

“Most peculiar.” The stranger-- Astral-- brought a hand up to his chin. “No humans besides Yuma have been able to see me so far. Have you been able to see me the whole time, or is now the first time?”

“I saw you when I woke up. Not before then.”

“I wonder what prompted this change?” Astral asked. “I’ve spent more time around Yuma’s other friends than you, but they still cannot see me. Maybe there’s something special about you.”

It seemed like Astral wasn’t an imaginary friend after all. Yusaku didn’t appreciate the comment about Yuma being his friend, but he was too tired to point it out or to think about why he could suddenly see Astral when he couldn’t before. All he could do was fall back asleep, pulled back towards it by the extra warmth Yuma’s arms provided him.

Yusaku woke up to the smell of something burning. He checked the time: it was fairly early in the day. Who was burning something this early? He looked around the room. Astral and Yuma weren’t here, so it was entirely possible that Yuma was the culprit. Figuring he better go check on him, Yusaku got up and followed the smell to its source in the kitchen.

He found Yuma in the house’s kitchen, perched over a pot on the stove. In a panic, he tried to grab it off the stove before yelping from pain. Yusaku sighed. If something had been cooking in the pot, then clearly it was hot and not to be touched with bare hands. Only a fool would do something like that.

Astral floated above Yuma, watching his work. “Interesting. Observation: contact with metal can sometimes cause pain to humans.”

“It’s because it’s hot,” Yusaku clarified. He walked across the kitchen to close the distance between himself and Yuma and Astral. “If you touch something really hot, it burns you.” Yusaku stared at Yuma. “What’s going on?”

“Oh. Uh.” Yuma blew on the part of his hand that touched the pot. “It’s kind of a complicated story.”

“I have time.”

“Well… You were talking in your sleep. About hot dogs?? It sounded kind of like you liked them, or at least, that’s what Astral thought. So I thought maybe if I made some hot dogs it would cheer you up? I mean, you had a bad nightmare last night, and being stranded in some other world has to be stressful for you. You know? But I kind of accidentally burned them…” Yuma laughed nervously. “So much for that, huh?”

“You never cooked hot dogs for me, Yuma.”

“You can’t eat human food, Astral! We already tried!”

Talking in his sleep? As far as Yusaku was aware, he didn’t talk in his sleep much. Maybe being in Heartland City was causing something weird to happen to him. Maybe that was why he could see Astral now. But he had been dreaming. It had been a nicer dream for once. He was visiting Kolter at Cafe Nom, like none of this ever happened. It was...nice, actually. He missed that more than he’d think he would. And Kolter did give him a hot dog in his dream…

Yusaku spent more time around Kolter than he did anyone else. He included school in that as well, since Yusaku skipped classes occasionally and Kolter and Yusaku pulled more all-nighters together than anyone else probably should. And now, Kolter wouldn’t let Yusaku pay for hot dogs and coffee anymore (though he did try to limit the amount of coffee Yusaku drank). He pretended to keep some sort of running tab for Yusaku while refusing to let him pay any amount of it off. And Yusaku only started eating hot dogs in the first place to have a reason to be at Cafe Nom that was actually legal, but by now they’d grown to be his favorite food. Yusaku did tend to stick to eating cheaper food anyway. Yet, hot dogs were still the winner. Some days he barely ate anything else.

Yusaku stared at the pot of burnt hot dogs. All burnt food smelled bad, and hot dogs were no exception. They weren’t going to be edible. It was a disaster on all accounts. But Yuma had done it thinking of him. Yuma’d gone out of his way to do something he wasn’t asked to do for him, with nothing for Yuma himself to gain from it. Yusaku didn’t know how to respond to that. Friends did this kind of thing for each other, right? Yusaku was rarely on the receiving end of something like this, and never on the giving end. That required having friends at all.

“Thank you,” Yusaku managed. Hopefully that was good enough.

“For what?” Yuma sounded confused. “For burning your hot dogs? That’s a weird thing to thank someone for. What, do they eat burnt hot dogs where you’re from?”

“No.”

“Then what are you thanking me for?”

Yusaku sighed. “Nevermind.”

“I believe that Yusaku was actually thanking you for the sentiment rather than the hot dogs themselves, Yuma,” Astral explained.

“I didn’t send anyone mints,” Yuma said.

“Nevermind.” Astral sighed.

Yusaku dreamed again the next night. It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t a dream of what he missed.

Earlier that day, Yuma had helped Yusaku look for a way home after school. It was difficult without having idea how Yusaku arrived in this world in the first place. The only idea they could think of was based on Astral being from another world as well. Apparently, as Yuma and Astral gathered Number cards, Astral began to regain memories as well. (Interesting, that Yusaku and Astral had both lost memories upon arriving in his world.) Astral suggested that the key might be within his lost memories. So, Yusaku ended up actually helping Yuma and Astral look for Numbers. They had no luck that day, though.

The dream Yusaku had wasn’t far off. He was trying to help Yuma deal with Numbers. Dreams could be nonsensical, however, and Yusaku’s dream often didn’t make sense. Sometimes, rather than Heartland City, he found himself in Den City, Link Vrains, and other places Yusaku couldn’t remember ever seeing before.

No matter where they were, Yuma kept dragging Yusaku along with him in his search. They seemed to be in a rush. But even though they never found anything before Yusaku woke up, Yusaku never felt too annoyed about the whole situation.

#hugsaku #hugsaku2021 #yugioh vrains #yugioh zexal #tater writes #this one starts out with yusaku waking up from a nightmare...#i've really enjoyed writing the banter between yuma and astral and i think this chapter really shows it off #as for yusaku being able to see astral... i've intentionally interpreted his abilities loosely for this fic #yusaku can sort of sense what's happening in vrains so i've decided to interpret that as #yusaku being able to sense things from other connected worlds #with vrains being connected to den city and astral world being connected to heartland #which is almost certainly not how it works but? i wanted yusaku to meet astral

7 notes · View notes