A/N: Written as a late, late request for a friend on Livejournal filling out a drabble meme. Said drabble turned into full-fledged fanfic. Writing this has surprisingly been emotionally draining, so it took me a long time to get back to revising it. Major thanks to my beta Sarah, who is as helpful as she is smart and kind. :)

Title: Homeward
Author: Puri
Fandom: Yume Nikki
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence and mature themes, including suicide.
Ships/Characters: Madotsuki & Seccom "Masada" Sensei.
Finished: Yes

I never thought I'd go this far
Without a star to cross the seas
So far from shores I'd left behind
Still far from shores I've yet to reach

I try to find the strength I need to calm the doubts in my belief
With the will, I know my heart won't break
And if I have strength, then I've belief
If I have love, my heart still beats
Here under stars far from home

—VNV Nation "Homeward"

"Where are we going?"
"Home."

That's what he always told her. Their conversations followed a similar vein, but not that he minded in the least. For all their unspoken communication, he liked this little girl. She asked him if he belonged to a distant planet among the stars. He preferred not to answer, letting his music speak for him. She didn't mind at all. A mutual contract had been agreed upon the day they met, once upon a dream. She promised to keep him company and leave him to the privacy of his work — music, that is. Composing.

"Where am I? What is this place?"
"Home."

She boarded his ship with wonder, as if expecting it to go somewhere. And it did. She believed it could fly. To be honest, it had been drifting in space all this time, following an aimless course in zero gravity. If it caught the orbit of a moon or a planet, the musician's ship would be stuck there. No engines. No boosters. It didn't run on fuel. He hadn't imagined his ship to possess any of these things. Sometimes the little girl did her part in piloting the ship, or at least tried to. Weather tactics didn't work the way she expected and the dome-shaped ceiling of his room dripped with water and thunder and snow. She growled and hissed at the window, waving her paws to put the gravitational pulls—if there were any—in her favor. He would bury his face in his hands not because he found the solution foolish, but because he didn't know what to do when the red color appeared on his cheeks like that; it embarrassed him that he didn't know what to do with himself, to be charmed by a little girl yet incapable of understanding his own cordial manner to her that went beyond mere kindness.

"Where are we going?"
"Home."

Not her home. The less spoken of that, the better. The musician was fearful for her safety, afraid of putting her life in jeopardy when she had friends and family at home waiting for her... after all, he was a wandering spaceman who lived in solitary environment among the stars. He reminded her that if she followed him, she would be lonely. The little girl shook her head, telling him she already was. She had nothing left, and with the honesty of only a girl her age was capable of, she said she didn't want to stay.

"I have no friends. I want to be with you. Please take me with you."
"Are you sure?"
"Please. I want to go."

He asked her about her mother and father. She never answered him, but when time grew meaningless and he spent whole hours at his piano, he could hear her crying in his bed. He wished he'd never asked.

"I didn't know you had a bed."
"It's my room."
"Do you sleep in it?"
"No..."

A bed is like home. It's where you go to make it "your space," but it's also like a spaceship that lets you wander and takes you to endless places. As he drifted in space without motive, she went across the universe. Neither of them being talkative people, she "showed" him her travels instead. Drawings on the table, notes being played, bellows of the walls. There were paintings over the ship that were beautiful and surreal and horrific. She didn't neglect a single color, crafting rainbows and smearing the contents so much they sludged into vomit. But she was a talented artist... surely those slip-ups were intentional? Had she been trying to tell him something? Did it explain the odd and hideous figures that were the subjects of her paintings, including the white smiling face that's supposed to be... him?

She kept a diary. She told him not to read it. He obeyed. He thought they would be about her dreams. Her paintings, her visions. Her recordings. It would hurt her if he intruded. She regularly showed him her dreams, so it wasn't necessary to read about them, was it?

"Do you ever get tired?"
"...Sometimes."
"Do you dream?"
"Yes. All the time."
"What do you dream about?"
"Home."

They reflected. They stared out the same window at the same sight. The stars didn't move. Nothing changed. She turned to him and smiled.

"Sensei, you're strange. But I like you. You're nice."

"Sensei, will you hurt me?"
"Of course not."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."

She wore a towel to bed. She stared and stared at him, until he had no choice but to leave the piano bench and join her. Sometimes she wanted him to tell him stories about his travels to help her sleep. He'd smile and offer her tea, which she accepted in little sips. Once she burnt her tongue and spilt the offending essence over the quilt, which the spaceman cleaned dutifully and offered a remedy to soothe her mouth. Always patient and understanding, he never scolded her, and stayed by her side until she no longer requested his presence. Sometimes she held him, nestling against his chest and sinking into sleep with his sleek, spindly arms embracing her. As a wandering spaceman, he had never been used to holding other visitors, and the little girl, back where she had come from, felt the same among her peers. It was an odd intimacy welcomed by both as figments floating alone in the midst of the galaxy. But the pair, normally reluctant to touch, found themselves perfectly content to lay in each other's arms for hours, thinking of nothing but the warmth of each other's company.

Sometimes it was awkward. During one of the times she sat on his lap, she remarked it felt funny. The spaceman wondered why and he'd cross his legs, conscientious. It hadn't occurred to him that he and the little girl were molded differently and he wondered if this intimidated her. The black suit he worn proved keen to point this out—those differences—and he felt ugly and naked. The little girl saw his concern and tried to comfort him, though she herself was embarrassed... not of the spaceman but of her own strange body. Later she showed him sketches that she made that were various portraits of herself. One with long golden hair and another with her braids undone. She was fat on one drawing, and looked like jelly on the other. In one she was tiny and another she couldn't be seen at all. One picture featured her filthy with her hair rolled up in a bun with flies circling around her head.

"Sensei, do you keep a diary too?"
"I'm afraid not."
"If you did, what would you write about?"
"...I don't know."
"You could write about home."

But the truth of the matter was, he didn't remember home anymore. Not clearly. Like space itself, the spaceman was caught somewhere in between. He was far enough from his starting point, but nowhere near what he thought to be shore. Was it a figment of his imagination or was he the figment itself? But it was this concept—home—that gave him directive, gave him belief. With his guest with him, he was sure he had something else to live for, that he would share the promised land with a girl who was also lost, who also held vague memories of the place she hoped to hold dear. In a world where time didn't pass, home was the dream. She and him, in their separate ways, were the dreamers.

The day they landed on that planet, the dream ended.

Is this home?

Before, he had been so scared, but maybe it was destiny that they were pulled into this planet's gravity. Perhaps the journey was over. The doubt would end. Even so, he found no courage to leave. But the little girl was eager and wanted to explore the new land that belonged to them alone. He admired that. So she set off and left the ship. He gawked at the sight at his window, staring into the barren land of rocks and dust. Was this what he wanted? Was he finally here? It hadn't turned out like he expected, but the spaceman hardly complained. The sky never changed from its empty, mysterious tan, and his fingers never lay on the keys. The piano remained untouched when the little girl came home, startling him out of his mantra. He asked her what she saw. It's boring here. Really? She admitted she had seen specks in the sky, but she couldn't be sure what they were. She told him she needed to go to bed. She was feeling tired and she wanted to try again later. That was all.

Time didn't pass on the planet either. But the little girl was ready and went out again. Once more, he gazed out the window and did nothing else. No piano, no notes. Although he admitted it's been a while—a long one at that, he'd lost track so many times he never kept count—he just didn't find the mood to play. He was much more interested in the little girl's accounts of her travels and waited anxiously for her return. It was hard to keep the trepidation out of his voice; she shrugged it off but she told him there was something, and that the specks turned out to be unidentified objects scattering in the sky and watching over her. Some days, she didn't see them, but they were there. She also found a small spout at a crater on top of a hill that blew steam.

"I wonder what it's like down there." she said. "If I was small enough, I could see." Would her dreams have something to do with it? Did she learn something new each time she went to bed, and she gained a special power that would enable her to do things that he cannot? Did she record them in her diary? Is that why she kept going outside despite the lack of aesthetic interest? Is there another reason she stayed with him for so long, in spite of his hopeless—and often tedious—quest for a place they called home?

This planet wasn't theirs after all.

She went down the spout herself. Someone else lived here, underground and isolated in a machine-powered dome not unlike the technology she remembered from her old planet. He was lonely and crying, and neither rejected or embraced her presence. It was all the same to him. He lived in a perpetual state of grief, as a native of a planet he destroyed with his own hand. He spoke of its past beauty in song, a song that meant everything to him and nothing to everyone else. The little girl comprehended the beauty and thought she could recognize it, but she had been too late to grasp the full meaning of it. The song left her in tears.

The land they found themselves in was ruined.

A ruined man. A ruined girl.
A ruined creature.
A ruined home.

The little girl found it hopeless. She vowed to leave the ship and never come back. He tried calling her back, but to no avail. Once again, he was stranded and lonely in space.

He never played the piano again.

He did nothing in his spaceship. The table and its chairs were empty. The piano keys were covered up by the little girl's sketches. All he had were memories. Misery. He stood like a ghost in his bedroom, gazing at the bed and never climbing into it. There was nothing left for him except for a brown notebook laid across the desk. Gingerly, he opened the diary. He brushed the cover with the back of his fingers, as if it was a doily dressing a slab of gold. Ready to accept the consequences of his actions, he turned to the first page.

Pain. Hatred. Spite. Cruelty. Raw from the first sentence, bleeding from a keyhole. Many things the little girl never dared tell him, all from the fear of making him sad or being banished from his ship. She wrote with vitriol of people she knew from real life, people she knew from her dreams, and how she hated them and wanted to see them dead. In her dreams, she got to do what she wanted. She got to possess powers she never would have gotten in her past life and could make herself beautiful and rich. Everybody would listen to her. If she didn't get what she wanted, she'd take it from them. She murdered her friends in gruesome ways and she thought it would make her happy. She could always bring them back, right? She could finally face the monsters who ruined her life, yet she'd be entirely helpless. She despised being weak and alone.

One day, she got mad at her best friend, and she couldn't bring her back, no matter how hard she tried. The girl with the blonde ponytail, who over the course of the diary was referred to as every negative adjective in the dictionary and her confidant and source of strength. Someone the writer referred to as beautiful and kind, a demon and a bitch, and raged with jealousy at the same time she adored her. She wanted to tear her limb from limb, she wanted to be just like her. She wanted her head ripped off with a giant knife and tossed into the sea to be eaten by a monster with giant teeth. She wanted to play at her house and build igloos together and eat cotton candy and stay with her forever. One day, her friend wouldn't speak to her, and she shut off the lights in rage. That... thing took her place, and no matter how she yelled and screamed at it, it wouldn't turn back.

She drew a picture of it and the spaceman froze in horror. He recognized it. The little girl told him of a horrible place it had taken her to where she couldn't get out. Now the spaceman read in detail about the creature with its face punched in and standing in the middle of the slush, a critical reminder of the little girl's doings. She felt it was asking her all kinds of questions and answering them for her, telling her exactly the kind of person she must be. You love doing this, do you? This is what you wanted, right? They deserved it, you deserved it. I deserved it. This is my fault.

I am horrible. I am selfish. I am ugly. I hurt people. I kill them. I don't deserve to live. I should die. There's no time or place for me. I don't belong here. I don't have friends. I don't deserve friends. Everything will be better off without me. If I really cared, I would be dead already. But I'm too scared to hurt myself. I'm a coward. I'm a murderer. No one should be near me. I should die. But I'm scared. I'm so terrible. I'm a monster. I should die.

If I get everything, will it make me stronger? Strong enough to kill me? I'm too weak.

I should die.

"You shouldn't die." The spaceman whispered. Even after she's written those things, dreamed those things... he still didn't want her die. They were bad things, but she wasn't a bad person. He didn't care if she was the horrible and selfish girl she said she was... she wasn't like that to him. She was brave, intelligent, creative and kind. She was thoughtful and innocent, and she made him see things in a light he had never considered before. Being with her made him a better person. Being with her made him smile and gave him hope again. None of the things she wrote about herself were true at all. If he could, he would show her just how much he cared for her. He may not be able to chase her demons away, but at least he could be there for her when she needed him. Just... he didn't want her to die. He had to find her. If it meant leaving the ship, he would do it. He had to rescue her before it was too late.

The spaceman headed for the doorway and saw the little girl standing there.

"You came back."

There were his last words before a flash like a silver ribbon jabbed his flesh. The spaceman howled in agony, and blood spattered his sides as the little girl stabbed him. She tried to hold him still as she plunged the blade into his arm and the spaceman barely struggled. There was tearing of fabric and the spaceman's skin looked frightening in contrast to the black cloth, violent compared to the blood that stained it. Strawberry gashes opened messily over his chest and torso, and the little girl stopped to wipe her eyes with her sleeves before continuing her onslaught.

The spaceman accepted all this, laying limp as she vented her frustrations into him. Then she stopped, and the knife slipped from her hands to the floor. Her arms were drenched and so was the rest of her clothes. She bent over his body and her hands tightened at his sides; she couldn't even hold him close because he was too bloody. She closed her eyes, refusing to look at what she'd done to him, and her chest heaved with long sobs. He was still breathing; she couldn't bear it anymore. The dying spaceman raised his hand and put it on her cheek, and she was too weak to push it away.

"I-I wanted to—! I wanted to come home. But now you hate me."
"I don't hate you. I never hated you."
"Yes you do!"
"No, I don't. I could never hate you."
"You do now! You read my diary! I thought, I thought I told you not to!"
"You were right. It was wrong of me to disrespect your privacy. But I don't hate you, Madotsuki. You mean everything to me... and it would devastate me if anything happened to you. You don't deserve to die."
"Yes I do! I'm a monster... you wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for me!"
"You're wrong. If it wasn't for you, I would have never found what I was looking for."
"B-But we never found anything! We never found home."
"We had each other... that's more than enough, wasn't it?"
"But..."
"Listen to me. If you killed yourself, it would hurt me more than anything you could do to me. You could stab me again, and I won't ever wish for your death. Just please, reconsider this... You mean the whole world to me and I can't ask for a greater companion to come with me on my ship. It's been my greatest pleasure to have you as my guest. You are always... welcome."

The little girl was speechless. Her crying fell to a whimper and she held the man's hand like a precious treasure. The knife had been put away. She kept her eyes shut. One more chance.

She pinched her cheek.

The End