Gazing at the shadow of the black umbrella stretched dark across the white soil, Eric's body went rigid, every muscle locking in place before his mind had even caught up to why.
His gaze fixed on it and refused to move.
Something in his chest shifted first, a slow, unfamiliar pressure building behind his ribs, and only after a long moment did he realize it was memory, fragments of it, rising out of some place he hadn't known still existed inside him. They came slowly at first, disjointed, half-formed, images without context, a sound without a source, and then faster, one folding into the next before he could properly hold onto any single one of them.
His breath caught somewhere in his throat.
He remembered pain, first. Small, sharp memories of being cold, of being hungry, of nights spent counting down hours until morning came. He remembered fear too, the kind that lived permanently in a person's shoulders, in the space between their ribs, never fully leaving even when nothing was actively wrong. Unfortunate things, so many of them, all crowding in at once, demanding to be felt again after years of being quietly, carefully buried.
His hands curled slowly at his sides.
Longing rose somewhere beneath the pain, unexpected and unwelcome, followed close behind by something that felt dangerously close to nostalgia, warm and aching at the same time. Surprise was threaded through both of them, sharp and disorienting. Sadness sat heaviest of all, settling into his chest like something with real weight to it. And yet, buried somewhere underneath all of that, so faint he almost missed it entirely, there was happiness too. Small. Fragile. Barely there.
He pressed his lips together, tight enough that he felt the pressure of it in his jaw, and bit down gently on the inside of his cheek, grounding himself in the small, physical sting of it.
This is that dream.
Fourteen years old. The night the voice had first spoken inside his head, uninvited, unexplained, and never fully gone since. He'd dreamed this exact place once before, all those years ago, and somewhere along the way he'd let the memory of it slip, buried it beneath everything else he'd needed to survive. Only fragments had ever remained, vague impressions he couldn't quite place, and yet even those fragments had carried him through more than one difficult night since.
A decade had passed. And now here he was again, standing in the same pink haze, the same soft white ground beneath his feet.
Except this time, he understood with a slow, creeping certainty that he wasn't standing where he used to stand.
He was on the other side now.
Eric took one step toward the umbrella.
His legs felt heavier than they should have, each movement small, deliberate, dragged forward by something that wasn't quite willpower and wasn't quite fear either, some uneasy mixture of both fighting for control over his own feet. His heart pounded, loud enough that he could hear it in his own ears, and some old, familiar instinct in him whispered that he should stop, that he should turn around, that whatever waited at the end of this path was better left undisturbed.
He kept walking anyway.
I'm scared, he admitted to himself, quietly, honestly, in a way he rarely allowed himself to be. I'm actually scared right now.
But his feet didn't stop moving, even as the fear sat heavy in his chest, and somewhere in that contradiction he found something steadier than he expected. If he couldn't bring himself to face his own past, quiet and harmless as it was, then what hope did he have of standing firm the day someone he actually loved was in real danger? What good would his strength be then, if his will still buckled at the first sign of discomfort?
Would I hesitate then too?
The thought alone made something cold twist in his stomach.
By the time hesitation like that finished playing out, the people he cared about would already be gone. There would be nothing left after that but regret, hollow and endless, and the very real risk of losing himself entirely to something far darker than grief.
That's the fate of the weak.
He straightened his spine slightly, jaw tightening.
I am not weak.
The fear didn't vanish, not entirely, but something in him settled around it, folded it into something he could carry instead of something that could stop him. He kept walking, and with each step, the tightness in his chest eased, fraction by fraction, his pulse slowing to something closer to steady, his mind quieting enough that his legs finally started moving with real purpose instead of reluctant obligation.
The umbrella had looked close from where he'd started. A hundred steps, maybe less, close enough to reach in a few short minutes if the ground beneath him behaved the way ground was supposed to behave.
It didn't.
Even after walking for more than two hundred steps, counted almost without meaning to, some small, restless part of his mind keeping tally just to have something steady to hold onto, Eric still hadn't reached the umbrella.
He glanced down at his own feet at one point, half expecting to find something wrong with them, some trick of the dream slowing his stride without his noticing. Nothing looked out of place. The ground passed beneath him the same as it always had, each step landing solid and real, and yet the distance between himself and that small black shape ahead of him refused to close the way it should have.
He didn't panic. Strangely, the longer it stretched on, the calmer he felt.
Somewhere around the two-hundredth step, without any clear moment of transition, the fear that had been sitting heavy in his chest simply wasn't there anymore. He noticed its absence before he noticed anything replacing it, a kind of hollow lightness settling into the space where dread used to live. His shoulders dropped. His jaw, which he hadn't even realized had been clenched this whole time, finally loosened.
His stride lengthened on its own, steps growing longer, more confident, carrying him forward with an ease that felt almost unfamiliar after everything leading up to this moment. Whatever memories had been clawing at him earlier had gone quiet now, tucked away somewhere he could reach later if he needed them, but no longer pressing in on him with quite the same urgency.
He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was looking forward to whatever came next.
Three hundred more steps passed beneath him, steady and unhurried, before Eric finally arrived at the black umbrella he'd been walking toward this entire time.
He stopped in front of it and simply looked at it for a moment.
There was nothing remarkable about it, not really. A plain black umbrella, closed, its handle a simple curve of tarnished silver. It could have belonged to anyone. It could have been picked up off any street corner in any city in the world. And yet something about the shape of it, the exact angle it leaned at where it rested against the pale ground, made his chest tighten in a way he couldn't fully explain.
He bent down slowly, almost reverently, and closed his right hand around the handle.
It was lighter than he expected, absurdly so, light enough that he half believed if he let go and tossed it into the air right now, it would drift back down toward him slow and unhurried, like a feather rather than something with real weight behind it. The metal beneath his palm was cold, properly cold, colder than the mild air around him had any right to make it, and the sensation of it grounded him somehow, made the moment feel more real rather than less.
Eric straightened up, umbrella in hand, and let out a long, slow breath.
A smile crept onto his face without his permission, soft and a little unsteady at the edges. "I finally saw you again," he murmured, mostly to himself, his voice quieter here than it ever was in the waking world. He turned the handle over once in his fingers, studying it. "Now I realize why I hold every umbrella I use in this certain way."
He lifted it, settling the handle against his right shoulder, both hands rising to hold it steady there, and the moment it settled into place, something in his posture eased even further, like a piece sliding home after years of sitting slightly wrong.
It was exactly the way he always carried an umbrella. The way he'd carried one on his walks to the mall back in Moscow, half-listening to strangers, keeping half an eye on the street around him. The way he carried one now, too, whenever he stepped out as Mike Jackson, the motion so ingrained he'd never once questioned where it came from.
Now I know, he thought, something bittersweet threading through the realization.
His gaze drifted, unhurried, toward his right, and there, further ahead through the drifting pink haze, he caught the vague outline of something else waiting for him.
A bench.
His breath caught softly in his throat.
His eyes, one pink and one a slightly deeper rose, seemed to catch some inner light of their own at the sight of it, brightening with something close to disbelief. The gentle smile still resting on his face deepened slowly into something heavier, something aching with longing, memory after memory of this exact dream, from all those years ago, rising gently to the surface now instead of crashing in all at once.
He straightened his spine, lifted his chin, and let himself simply feel it for a moment, whatever it was, before he started walking again.
The bench looked close. Three hundred steps, maybe, judging by the eye alone.
It took nearly a thousand before he finally reached it.
He noticed, as he drew closer, the strange, deliberate way the pink fog thinned and then vanished entirely in a wide circle around the bench itself, leaving a small, clear patch of the world behind, the true colors of things visible there in a way they weren't anywhere else in this place. The bench itself was simple, light brown, metal, a little worn at the corners the way old benches always were. The white soil beneath it looked exactly like the soil beneath his own feet, and yet somehow it felt different, more solid, more real, sitting just beyond the edge of the fog.
Eric stopped there, one single step away from crossing out of the mist entirely.
He stood still for a long moment, umbrella resting against his shoulder, and took one slow, deliberate breath after another, calming himself as thoroughly as he knew how, quieting every layer of himself- mind, body, something that felt close enough to soul to count, heart, and whatever tangled mess of emotion still lingered beneath all of it.
Then he waited.
It didn't take long.
Movement stirred at the far edge of the clearing, a small shape drifting toward the bench from the opposite direction, still wrapped in the pink fog on that side, its outline reduced to a vague, dark silhouette, unclear in every detail except its size and the careful, hesitant way it moved.
A child's shadow entered his vision.
It was small, slight. Moving like it wasn't entirely sure it wanted to be moving at all.
The boy quickly walked until he was just one step away from entering the area where there was no pink fog.
The boy hesitated for a few seconds before he finally took his first step inside.
The boy who stepped fully into view was somewhere around fourteen, and by every right his eyes should have carried the easy carelessness of that age, mischief without weight behind it, curiosity without consequence trailing after it.
They didn't.
What Eric saw instead, as the boy's small frame finally cleared the last thin curtain of fog, was fear. Raw, constant, deeply practiced fear, the kind that had clearly stopped being an occasional visitor a long time ago and had instead settled in permanently, made itself a home behind those young eyes. The boy's gaze darted constantly, sweeping the clearing in short, sharp movements, cataloguing every shadow, every gap in the mist, some part of him permanently braced to run the moment anything moved wrong.
His small hands were pressed together, knuckles pale, clutched tight against his own chest like a shield he'd built out of nothing but his own fingers. His legs trembled faintly beneath him, a fine, involuntary shiver he was clearly fighting to control, jaw set with the kind of stubborn effort only a frightened child could manage, trying so hard to think clearly, to stay calm, to not fall apart in a place he didn't understand.
His clothes hung loose and tattered on his small frame, clearly meant for someone slightly larger, patched in places, worn thin in others, the kind of clothes that had been handed down or scavenged rather than bought new. His face carried the hollow look of a body that hadn't been fed properly in longer than it should have been, cheeks a little too sunken, the healthy shine that belonged on a boy his age simply absent.
He was scared. Painfully, visibly scared.
And still, somehow, he forced words out.
"Where am I?" the boy whispered, barely audible, and yet in the strange, heavy silence of this place, the words carried clearly across the distance between them. "I have to get out. What will happen to Max without me?"
Something in Eric's chest cracked open at that.
His eyes widened, stinging fast and sudden, blurring at the edges before he even registered what was happening. He drew in a slow, deliberate breath through his nose, forcing it down deep, refusing to let the tears actually fall.
Short pink hair. Heterochromic eyes, one pink, one rose. A face he hadn't seen in this exact configuration in over a decade, staring back at him from across a clearing in a dream neither of them fully understood.
Me. That's me.
He remembered this. Not clearly, not in detail, but he remembered the shape of this fear, the exact texture of it, remembered what it had felt like to stand exactly where that boy now stood, certain the world was one wrong step away from ending.
Eric wiped quickly at his own eyes with the back of one hand, steadied himself with another slow breath, and took his first step out of the pink fog.
The boy flinched hard at the movement, stumbling half a step backward on instinct, small body already tensing to bolt.
Eric stopped where he was, held perfectly still, and let his expression soften as fully as he could manage, offering nothing but a warm, gentle smile down at the boy in front of him.
Young Eric stared up at him, and something in his small face shifted from raw fear into something closer to disbelief, his eyes tracing over the man's face slowly, piece by piece, like he was trying to convince himself of something impossible.
"W-who are you?" the boy finally managed, voice unsteady. "Where is this? Is this... is this related to these mysterious Auras too?"
His heart was clearly still pounding; Eric could see it in the quick rise and fall of his narrow chest, but even as he asked, some of the sharpest edge of panic in his eyes was already beginning to dull, replaced by something more curious, more searching.
Eric felt something like quiet pride settle in his chest, watching that.
Even back then, I could calm myself down fast. Good.
He didn't answer the question directly. Instead, he simply lifted one hand and gestured toward the bench beside them, a silent invitation.
The boy hesitated only a moment before understanding and crossing to sit at the farthest corner of it, pressed close to the armrest, putting as much distance between himself and this stranger as the bench allowed.
Eric settled onto the opposite end, unhurried, and let a long silence stretch out between them before he spoke again.
He understood exactly why the silence was necessary. He remembered, better than anyone else ever could, precisely how long it took for a boy like that to feel steady enough to actually hear anything said to him.
Finally, when the shivering in those small shoulders had eased slightly, Eric spoke, his voice low and even.
"I'll be direct with you," he said. "No point wasting time dancing around it. I'm you but older. From further down the road than you can imagine right now." He paused, watching the words land. "A lot's changed since you're standing where you are. This is the same dream I had at your age too, sitting exactly where you're sitting now, across from an older version of myself. And when you grow up, when you walk far enough down whatever path is waiting for you, you'll end up here again too. Except next time, you'll be the one sitting where I am now, looking at some younger version of yourself."
Eric wasn't stinting on telling his younger self. The reason for this was simple.
Because he would forget most of the dream when he woke up anyway. It would at least take a decade before this younger self of his grew up and entered this dream to meet his younger self. It wouldn't matter till then anyway.
His younger self didn't react with anything dramatic. He simply sat there for a moment, eyes fixed on the ground between his own worn shoes, before slowly lifting his gaze to meet his older self's face.
"I understand," the boy said quietly. "I only have one question. How is life now? Did we make it?"
Something in Eric's chest tightened painfully at that, the simple, desperate hope tucked inside such a plain question. He closed his eyes for a moment before answering, keeping his voice level.
"I won't say we won," he said carefully. "But we're in a much better place now than we were. Max is still with us. He's also happy. We're both married now." He paused, letting the boy absorb that much first. "We still move around a lot, working all kinds of jobs. Right now we're police officers, tangled up in some mysterious operation in Paris. The four great bodies are circling us too, all of them trying to pull us into their own factions."
Young Eric nodded slowly, taking it in, then asked another question almost immediately, apparently forgetting his earlier claim of only having one. "Did we... fulfill our dream?"
Eric shook his head, eyes still closed. "No. Not yet. But we will. One day, we definitely will."
To his surprise, his younger self let out a small, quiet laugh at that.
Eric opened one eye in a narrow slit, glancing sideways at the boy, a faint smile tugging at his own mouth despite himself. "Why are you laughing?"
"B-because it means we've still got a long road ahead of us," the boy said, a little breathless with the sudden, fragile relief of it. "Problems are just... part of chasing something. That's normal, right? That's how it's supposed to be."
"You've got surprising wisdom for a fourteen-year-old."
"I'm you," young Eric shot back, some faint spark of dry humor slipping through the fear for the first time. "Obviously."
Eric huffed out something close to a real laugh at that, and for a moment the tension between them eased slightly.
"Are you still busy building formations and training your Gravitation Aura?"
"Obviously I am; this is why we became this strong in the future and have an entire kit of comprehensible Aura Techniques."
"It is good to know that my present efforts would bear fruit in the future."
"They are bearing huge fruits, I would say."
"How are Max and Visie doing? On your side, I mean," young Eric asked, leaning forward slightly now, genuine curiosity breaking through his earlier caution.
Eric considered the question for a long moment before answering.
"They're both fine," he said. "Max is still as chaotic and airheaded as ever; don't worry, some things never change. But he's grown a lot too. He can build his own strategies now, set his own traps, and doesn't need me hovering over every decision anymore. He's never once left our side, never once gone through anything." He paused. "Visie's the same too. She is still lively and curious about everything, always trying to read into things and divine answers to questions way over her head."
He hesitated there, his expression sobering.
"I know telling you this probably won't change anything," he continued, quieter now, "but I want you to hear it anyway. Visie is going to get badly hurt one day. The injury would lock her rank permanently, keeping her from ever advancing past Lysi Nova." He swallowed hard, forcing the next part out. "And it's going to be our fault. It is going to be something we do, some mistake in the middle of a fight, that is going to be the reason it happens to her."
Young Eric's face went pale.
"...Our fault?" he repeated slowly, the words clearly landing heavier than anything else said so far.
"Ours," Eric confirmed, unable to keep a flicker of old guilt from crossing his face even now, all these years later. "I won't tell you how, or when. It wouldn't change anything even if I did; you'll forget most of this the moment you wake up anyway. But I wanted you to know. It happens. And it never fully stops hurting, even after all this time."
The boy sat with that for a long moment, something heavy and uncomfortable settling behind his young eyes, before he finally exhaled and nodded slowly, like he was forcing himself to accept it rather than actually understanding it yet.
"I guess I should've figured something like that would happen eventually," he said eventually, voice quieter now. "She's always been too careless for her own good." A small, sad smile tugged at his mouth. "But I'm glad Max grows up okay, at least."
He looked ahead again after a moment, his cheeks coloring slightly, clearly eager to steer the conversation somewhere lighter. "So... who did we end up marrying?"
Eric let out a slow breath, some of the heaviness in his chest easing at the shift in subject, though a faint, knowing sadness lingered behind his small smile. "Sigh. You still haven't lived through that certain accident yet, have you? Otherwise you wouldn't even be asking that so easily." He shook his head slightly. "We married a woman named Ruby. She is beautiful, a little chaotic in her own way, but she loves us more than we probably deserve. Meanwhile, Max married a woman named Zoe, similar story there too. Both of them are wonderful, in their own particular kind of madness."
Young Eric's brow furrowed, some clear disappointment creeping into his expression. "So... not Visie? That's weird."
"There were reasons," Eric said simply, not offering anything further. The time here was limited, and some things weren't meant to be unpacked in a single conversation, not even with himself.
After a while longer, after trading smaller details back and forth, the easy kind of exchange that only ever happens between two people who genuinely know exactly who they're talking to, Eric finally straightened. He had one thing left to say, and it mattered more than everything that had come before it. Something that might sink deep enough into his younger self's mind to steady him through everything still waiting ahead.
He drew himself upright, shoulders squaring. Across from him, his younger self noticed the shift in posture immediately, some instinct already understanding that whatever came next was going to matter.
Eric drew in a slow breath. His eyes had gone wet, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried a tremor he made no effort to hide.
"Eric Heisenberg." He said the name like it belonged to someone he respected, someone he'd fought hard to become. "You are a very special person. You are talented. Smart. Observant. Kind, in the ways that actually matter. A little selfish too, and that's alright, as long as it stays a little." He paused, letting the words settle before continuing. "You don't trust people easily. That's fine. But your childhood friend, keep trusting him. Never stop. You can find the right answer even when everything's falling apart around you, and you can endure things most people would break under."
He swallowed, his throat tightening slightly.
"You'll do whatever it takes to make things work, for yourself and for Max. And you'll find, more than once, that you can end another person's life without flinching, without any weight sitting on your conscience afterward." His voice dropped lower. "That shouldn't be something you let yourself get comfortable with. It will cost you something, eventually, if you let it. It will make you cold. It could make you into exactly the kind of monster your Aura's subconscious has been waiting for the chance to turn you into." He held his younger self's gaze, steady now despite everything. "Hold onto your humanity. Whatever you decide, decide it fully, and follow through without flinching. But never stop caring about the people standing beside you. Never stop being aware of what they mean to you."
Younger Eric hadn't moved, hadn't blinked, absorbing every word in complete silence.
"I know there will be moments," older Eric continued, softer now, "where it feels like there's nothing left ahead of you but despair. Where hope feels like something other people get to have. It isn't. It's still there, even then. You just have to keep walking toward it, one step after another, even when you can't see where it leads yet." He managed a small, tired smile. "When you don't know what to do, trust Max. Trust Visie. They'll never steer you wrong."
He reached out, resting a hand briefly on his younger self's shoulder.
"You might not understand everything I've just told you. That's fine too. Just don't forget the one thing that actually matters." His voice cracked slightly on the next words. "You are not destined to stay a poor, broken soul forever. Find your own path. Walk it. Even if you forget every single word I just said to you, walk it anyway."
Younger Eric stood frozen for a long moment after that, turning the words over in silence, sensing something buried beneath them that he couldn't quite name. He had nothing to offer in return. He simply nodded, slow and deliberate, and let a small smile form on his face.
Something in his eyes had changed. The fear that had lived there before, the hesitation, had burned away entirely, replaced now with something steadier. Pride. A quiet, growing certainty about whatever came next. His heart, for the first time in longer than he could remember, felt entirely clear.
Older Eric, his own eyes gone fully black now, looked down at the boy in front of him with something aching and sad behind his expression. He said nothing about what was actually coming. There were no warnings, no details. Just a slight smile.
Even if he'd told him everything, what difference would it have made?
And even if it could have changed something, he wouldn't have said it anyway. The suffering. The setbacks. The betrayals that had carved him into who he was now- every one of them was a piece of himself he refused to trade away, even in hindsight. He wasn't going to run from any of it. Not even now, looking his own younger self directly in the eyes.
The two of them stood there together for a long moment, quiet, steady, nothing left unsaid between them that actually needed saying. Then, slowly, they both smiled, one last time, before speaking their final words to each other.
"Thank you," older Eric said, "for never giving up."
"Thank you," younger Eric answered, "for making it this far."
The dream around them began to unravel at the edges, color bleeding out of everything, and Eric woke up.
Sunlight spilled slowly through the curtains, gentle and unhurried, warming the room by degrees rather than all at once. Eric stirred beneath it, shirtless, his breathing already steady and even, and when his eyes finally opened, there was none of the usual tension waiting behind them.
He sat up slowly, without urgency, and let his gaze drift across the room. Ruby's side of the bed sat empty, the sheets folded back neatly, and from somewhere down the hall he could hear the soft, familiar sounds of the kitchen, a pan settling against the stove, water running briefly, her quiet humming threading through it all.
He didn't rush to join her. For once, he let himself simply sit there instead, listening.
His eyes drifted to the window, and beyond it, a sky so clear and blue it looked almost freshly painted, not a single cloud interrupting it anywhere. He watched it for a while, longer than he normally allowed himself to sit still for anything, and something in his chest, some old, familiar tightness he'd carried so long he'd stopped noticing its weight, had simply loosened overnight.
A small smile found its way onto his face, unhurried, unforced.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this. Not happiness exactly, nothing so loud as that. Something quieter. Steadier.
Peace.
He sat with it a while longer, letting it settle fully into him rather than second-guessing it the way he might have once. He hadn't woken with any new answers. The questions that had followed him for years, about his awakening, about the voice, about everything still tangled and unresolved somewhere beneath the surface of his life, hadn't gone anywhere. They were still there, waiting.
But something else had arrived alongside them now, something that hadn't been there before.
Not certainty. Not resolution.
Just the quiet, steady willingness to keep walking toward all of it anyway.
He lifted his left hand and pressed it gently to his own cheek, feeling the warmth of the morning sun still lingering there, and let out a slow, unburdened breath.
"I'm ready," he said softly, to no one but himself. "Finally."
He sat there a moment longer in the stillness, listening to Ruby humming from the kitchen, watching the sky hold perfectly still outside his window, and, for the first time in longer than he could properly remember, he let himself simply exist in it. No calculations running underneath. No next move already half-formed in the back of his mind.
Just this. Just now.
It was enough.