The world around Kai was made of bright paper with clean edges. Folded cranes flew around the sky, people with blank faces walked the spotless streets into an empty horizon. The only sound to be heard was the soft rustling of paper, like a still ocean.

He himself stuck out on his relative colourfulness and his natural unevenness. If he wanted to assimilate, he would have to become like a blank page, and he somehow doubted that he was capable of that.

"Who are you?" a voice asked and he turned around to be met with a familiar face. It was the exact boy he had seen in the pictures, a shifting mayhem of photographed moments that had long passed. It looked comical, the way his body was normal and human, while his face was like a bad cut-out. His haircuts, his facial expressions, everything jumped from one extreme to the next.
The boy probably only remembered his face from pictures, so he couldn't keep a fixed shape in his mind. Those parts of his body he could see himself looked accurate, only his face was a blur.

"Why don't you look like the others?" the boy asked in irritation when Kai didn't reply. He looked at two paper figures walking by, as if to assure himself that everything else in his world was still in order.

Kai shrugged. "Well, I'm not part of your memory, that's why. I don't belong here."

The boy's face froze and showed just one single picture. There probably weren't so many pictures of him frowning. "How did you get here?"

"Well," he said and thought about it for a second. The 'how' was something he wasn't so sure of himself. To enter people's minds was like breathing and talking to him, things he just somehow learned to do, although he never consciously made the decision to. He walked into dreams the way he walked into houses. He just did. There was no manual, no way to explain it.
"That's not really important actually. I'm not here to stay," he finally said. "I have a message for you."

"A message?" the boy asked and sounded confused. It must have been ages since he last heard anything from the world outside. His self in his mind still looked like a teenager, although the real him had long grown into an adult. He probably even thought that Kai was older than him

"Yeah," Kai nodded. "A message from your father," he managed to say, before a tearing noise interrupted him. The ground was ripped into half, and a couple of houses dropped into a white abyss. He didn't flinch, simply because he was already much too used to things like that. It had taken him a while but he knew that an average mind couldn't hurt him.

"I'm not going back," the boy hissed, as the horizon began to crumble.

"I'm not asking you to," Kai said and avoided  a swarm of folded birds that crashed down the sky in oddly distorted shapes. "As I said, I'm just here to tell you something he wants you to know." His payment wasn't enough to deal with ridiculous outbursts like that. The boy's mind was clear and straight-forward, so it certainly wasn't among the worst he had seen, but it still depressed him. It wasn't natural, as if the boy forced himself to have nothing but sterile thoughts.

"Your mother passed away last month," Kai said.

And something changed.

Words started to spread across the paper, words written in black ink that slowly cut wounds into the clean spaces.
Kai couldn't make out most of them. Although he understood foreigners in their dreams, he couldn't read their languages. It always puzzled him, but there rarely were any major inconveniences. It didn't matter what the boy wrote, his pain came across well enough.

"You're lying," the boy yelled as his face fell apart into mismatching shreds. Ink started to drip on his shoulders and darkened the sky.

"If that's what you think, you should probably take a look yourself," Kai said as he left the world that changed from eternal white into eternal black.


Outside he was taken aback by the bright daylight and had to blink.

The old man looked at him and spoke to him in that language he couldn't make sense of in the real world.
"Did you meet him?" his secretary translated. "Was he well? What did he say? Is he going to come back?"

Kai shrugged. "No idea, but I did tell him about his mother. Whatever he does from now on, is his decision."
He looked at the comatose figure of the boy who had changed into a young adult.

---

Luhan, the only son of a Chinese plutocrat, tried to commit suicide by jumping off one of the buildings owned by his father when he was sixteen.
He didn't die, but he didn't really live either, and fell into a coma, as if he himself didn't have the will to go on. Five years had passed since then.

"I heard it's because his father tried to kill his mother," the secretary explained in a hushed voice when they were on their way to the hospital. She clearly was afraid of her employer. "He had many affairs and didn't even deny it. The boy then confronted his father, who got angry. He took it out on his wife, and she fell down the stairs. She lost his mind after that, and had to be taken into a mental institution."

"And he didn't go to prison?" Kai asked, although he was only mildly interested. His job was to pass messages and to help people make sense of their dreams. After all the things he had witnessed, he had stopped caring about personal fates.

"It was proven to have been an accident," the secretaty said, and obviously seemed to think of it as a lie. "But he regrets it. I mean, how could he not? His wife and his son were both alive, though not really. And now she died, and all he has left is a child who refuses to wake up."

Kai sighed. There was no way he could help someone like that. He was neither a saint, nor a psychologist.

But there was something about comatose patients that intrigued him. If they had been asleep over such an extended períod of time, chances were high that someone else could have passed through their dreams.

In the end it was always that tiny hope that allowed him to go on.

---

"You're not going to come back, are you?" he asked as he jumped over a mount of paper bits. Luhan's world had crumbled. The only things left were a vast area of shreds and a sky with ink stains.

Luhan's face had disappeared completely. His body was still the same, but his head had turned into  a paper ball with a doodled grimace. It looked even sadder than before, although he barely had an expression.

"Is she really dead?" Luhan asked and turned his head into Kai's direction.

"I guess," Kai said. "I didn't exactly confirm it. Your father only paid me to tell you."

Luhan sighed and hunched his shoulders. The paper around him stirred, although there was no wind, and the ink stains in the sky began to spread again.
"Well, you did tell me," he meekly said. "So why are you still here?"

He hesitated for a moment, before he said, "There's someone I'm looking for."

Luhan moved his head and the grimace in his crumbled face shifted in an odd way, almost like a grin. "Don't you think this is the wrong place?" he sneered. "Even I know that there's no one but me here."

Kai already had his answer. He knew the moment he met Luhan who was surprised to see him, and it was even more obvious now. But he couldn't just give up. To wander through dreams was the only chance he had.
"Did you ever notice anything strange here?" he asked. "Anything you were pretty sure wasn't created by your own mind?"

Luhan laughed again. "Apart from you, you mean?"
And then he paused.
"There are more people like you?"

It was no use.

There was no point in him staying any longer.

But before he left, he turned to Luhan once more.
"Your father is living pretty well, you know," he said. "Don't you think it would be easier to punish him face-to-face?"

He didn't wait to see Luhan's reaction, because it had nothing to do with him anyway. The last thing he heard was the noise of ripping paper.



Kai could enter dreams.

He didn't do it because he enjoyed it or because he couldn't help it. It made him uncomfortable to be in strangers' minds, but he was always in full control. There was no thrill, no fun, nothing that would have made it less disturbing.

And yet he constantly entered dreams.

Because it paid well.

Because he had a talent he could make use of.


Because he was looking for someone he had lost in a dream.

Ugh, I know I probably shouldn't start another story, but atm I have trouble focussing on things, and this idea randomly popped up. Idk whether I will really finish this one anytime soon, but right now I just want to force myself to write anything at all.

Also, this was kinda supposed to be a one-shot for my one-shot collection but then it slowly grew into this vague idea.