User:Feathertail/A Dream Come True

A Dream Come True

Author: Jared Spurbeck

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"Hayaikawa!" His mother pounded on the door again. "Hayaikawa Iwao! Come out of there at once! We're not paying for your Internet if you're not going to get a job."

One ear on top of his head cocked towards the door. And a part of Hayaikawa's brain, the part that hadn't panicked, thought "Hey, that's kind of neat." The rest of him just stared at his fox ears and muzzle, and the white fur and claws on his hands, and the bushy tail that was brushing the bathroom wall as he crouched on the sink in front of the mirror. And he was so scared that he was starting to have those detached thoughts, because it was like the part of his brain that could think and the part of his brain that could feel were no longer speaking to each other.

"I wonder what my friends online will think?" the part of his brain that was still working thought, and it was like the thought just came to him without his having to think it. The rest of him was gripped with this panic that was just getting worse and worse.

More pounding on the door. "Hayaikawa! You don't have time to be staying in there. I'm supposed to be at work right now. Come out of there, I still need to drop you off at the bus stop!"

"That would not be a good idea," his brain thought, unbidden.

His throat began to tighten.

"What if somebody saw me?"

An animal whine started to build up in his throat, and he fought it back, not knowing what would happen if his family heard it.

"I mean, if you saw me, for instance. You'd start crying and screaming ... "

He tried to hold it back as best as he could, but his eyes began to water. He could no longer breathe.

" ... and you've already been mad at me for not getting the grades that you want me to. So what're you going to do when you see ... that ... "

The whine came out of his throat.

"What was that?" His mother was startled.

Hayaikawa jumped down from the sink and curled up next to the bathtub, hugging his shoulders and burying his head in his arms and rocking back and forth slowly, too terrified to do anything else. "Go away go away go away ... "

He kept repeating that in his head, as his fox ears cocked towards the door and listened to his mom and his dad arguing. They were talking about what to do with him, and they had switched to Japanese but he still understood most of it. So he knew that his mom was talking about grounding him for life, and his dad was being patient with her and suggesting that she wait on that.

Finally his mom left for work, and his dad knocked on the door. "Hayaikawa?" he asked. "Are you alright?"

"Go away go away please just go away ... "

"Your mother is worried about you. You're not talking to us, and we don't know what's happened."

The thought came to him that "I'd like to talk to you right now, but I don't know what my voice will sound like and I'm scared that you'll find out what's happened."

"She's worried that you are using drugs, and are trying to hide their effects from us."

"I'm not, dad. I've just been having these strange dreams lately, and they've been getting so real and vivid ... "

"I told her that that was preposterous, because our son would never do that. But it's hard to defend you to her when you are refusing to talk to us."

" ... and I learned how to control them, and I looked forward to them every night. And that's why I started getting my homework done fast, so I could get to sleep and get back to the dreams ... "

"I would very much like it if you would talk to us."

" ... and I never ... I ... I ... "

"Are you alright?"

Another short whine escaped his throat. He buried his face in his arms and shook as he cried his new eyes out silently, choking back the noise that he wanted to make and just screaming inside.

His father stood outside, saying nothing, the entire time. Then, finally, "I have got to leave for work, or I will be late. You have my cellphone number. Please call me and let me know how you are."

Footsteps went away from the bathroom door. Then the front door opened and closed, and the car door opened and closed, and the engine started and his dad drove off. Hayaikawa was amazed at how clearly he could hear it all.

Then he heard a loud CLICK somewhere in the house, and it made him jump up and look around, fur standing on end. A second later there was another click, and then the heater vents turned on. Warm air blew into the room.

Hayaikawa huddled next to the heater vent, letting it dry his tears. He sniffled, and grabbed a tissue from off the sink to dry his muzzle with. Then another, and another, until he had a small pile of them. He threw them all in the trash, and shivered next to the vent.

What was he supposed to do now?

The thought came to him that what was happening was impossible. Because of that, he realized, he had to be dreaming still. The thought gave him hope, and helped him to calm down.

How had he lost control of the dream? How had he forgotten that he was dreaming? Hayaikawa did not know. But he knew a few ways to find out.

The first way he knew was to look in the mirror. If he wasn't himself when he looked in the mirror inside a dream, his reflection was always distorted, and he was unable to look at it clearly. Hayaikawa had already looked in the mirror that morning, but he wanted to be thorough, because dreaming could mess up one's perception of time. (He made a mental note to make sure that the clock readouts made sense.) So he crawled back onto the sink, and looked at his face.

His face was not even the slightest bit human. It looked just like that of an arctic fox, with thin white fur that was tinged with ice blue. His nose was black and his eyes were brown, and he stared into them, seeing a wide-eyed fox on the other side of the mirror and unable to comprehend that it was him.

He touched the tip of his muzzle, and could feel the pressure placed on his nose bone. Then he pinched it shut and tried to breathe through it, and was unable to. Finally he traced one claw all the way up to his forehead, and it made him want to sneeze. A thought came to him, and he scritched at the top of his head, but he wasn't sure what to make of the feeling.

He held up his hands to the mirror. They looked strange, but he could see them clearly, too. He did not have fingernails anymore, but dull claws, which he could not retract and which stretched out past his fingertips. And the undersides of his fingers and the palms of his hands were coated in black, leathery pads. He pressed his two palms together, and it felt like he was wearing gloves. But from the back, his hands looked almost normal.

So did his arms, except that they had thin white fur on them. These are my arms, he thought, looking at them. And yet they're not. They weren't like his face, which looked all fox. They almost looked human. He traced a claw along the top of his forearm, feeling the hairs part in front of it. And then he carefully pinched himself. It hurt, just like it always had, and he smoothed out his fur afterwards.

Okay ... he thought, and looked in the mirror again. Now what?

Behind him, his tail swished, and he turned around to look at it. It was bushy and pure white, and looked spectacular. Hayaikawa wished that it weren't stuck behind him, because he very much wanted to look at it. He reached around and felt it, running his hand all along it, and it felt fluffy and soft. But it was uncomfortable for him to do that, because his tail didn't want to be pulled upwards in the arc that his arm was traveling. He let go of it and let it do what it wanted to, and it swished itself as he looked at it and grinned.

Hayaikawa sniffled and blew his muzzle again, then tossed the tissue into the trash and looked back up at the mirror. There he was, a real live fox, with ears and tail and a muzzle.

He shrank from himself, because he didn't want to accept it. It wasn't a thought so much as a feeling; his subconscious was scared, and wanted his human parts to be him, and to think that his fox features weren't. It felt like it had been violated, and was refusing to let itself be this.

Hayaikawa closed his eyes, and counted to ten in his mind. And when he opened them and looked in the mirror again, he was the fox, tail and facial features and all. And he sniffled, and grinned nervously, and let his subconscious stop worring about "How can I be that?" and just accept that he was.

Then he hopped down from the sink, unlocked and opened the door, and went to go set up his webcam.

* * *

Hayaikawa took a whole slew of pictures of himself, after drawing the curtains and making sure that the front and back doors were locked. Then he realized that he hadn't showered yet, and decided he might as well do so.

It took him a long time, because his fur wanted to tangle instead of wash. By the time that he finally got out he was covered in soaking wet fur, which stayed damp even after he'd used two thick towels. He wiped the fog off of the mirror and looked at his messed-up fur, and decided that it was a good thing that he'd already taken the pictures. Afterwards he put on his pants backwards, so that his tail would have someplace to go.

It was eleven o'clock when he finally ate breakfast. Sugary cereal didn't appeal to him at the moment, so he fried up some vegetarian sausage instead. It was warm and delicious, and he didn't even need to add cheese.

He tried not to think as he ate, because he knew if he did he'd be scared again. But he couldn't help it, because his mind was starting to wander. "What's going to happen to me?" it thought. "What should I do?"

"What can I do?"

He tried to think of a government agency he could call. Then he imagined men in black suitcoats quarantining his house, their guns photoshopped into walkie-talkies as people in spacesuits climbed through the windows. And he didn't think that he liked that idea.

Try as he might, though, Hayaikawa couldn't think of any scenario in which that didn't end up happening. The only question was, what would he tell his parents?

He did not want to face them, because he was scared of how his mother would panic and he had no idea what his father's response might be. So he decided instead that he'd write them a letter, and somehow manage to be outside the house by the time they came back home. He wasn't sure how he'd get anywhere on foot in suburbia without being noticed, but he decided he had to try ...

... after he was done on the 'net.

It was easy to get distracted on the Internet, because Hayaikawa really wanted to be distracted right now. He didn't want to think about what he'd have to do, or how badly things would turn out, or what sort of panic his mom would be in. So he sat there on the chair in his messy room, in front of his old computer, and played Flash games for two hours.

After that he decided he needed to start planning what he would do. He wanted to pace, but there was nowhere in his room where he could, so he crawled over the clothes and things on the floor and went out to the hallway. Then he started pacing, going up and down the hallway, thinking with hands clasped behind his back and occasionally fiddling with his tail.

He had to go someplace. But where? Who could he trust? Was there anyone he knew online well enough? Would his relatives take him in?

His tail really was fluffy, he thought.

Hayaikawa began pacing faster and faster, not because he felt nervous but because he was forgetting how nervous he was, and realizing that he wanted to be out and about. He included the kitchen and living room in his circuit, weaving around obstacles and moving them aside when he could, surprised by how good it felt just to move around.

The lights were off, and the only light came from through the cracks in the drawn curtains. Hayaikawa wanted to look outside, but he didn't want to be seen in case a car was driving past outside. And he knew what he'd see out there, anyway ... suburbia, with its two-car garages and seven-foot fences that went all the way down to the curb.

All of a sudden, Hayaikawa wished that his family still lived at their old house up in the hills. His mom had hated driving down their dirt path to get into town, then coming back home when it was raining and driving uphill over ice and slush. He remembered looking out the window at wet branches that brushed over the window, and clanked along the roof, and went on forever in the thick forest ... and he remembered breathing onto the window, in the chill air, and drawing faces in the fog.

But he also remembered how he had cringed, as his mother had shouted and swore and stepped on the gas pedal, making the wheels whine as they struggled to pull their car up. And he remembered sitting there in the stuck car for over an hour, listening to furious silence from his mom and talk radio from the speakers, and waiting for his dad to come down there and tow them up. By the time his dad had shown up, he'd really needed to use the restroom, and the jarring motions of the tow cable on his mom's car hadn't helped matters any.

Hayaikawa remembered curling up next to the wood-burning stove in a blanket, sipping hot cocoa and thawing out from the cold. He remembered looking outside at the rain, and thinking of how it would snow soon, and of how much he loved to sled down the hill that his house was on top of. And he realized that he missed it terribly, and wanted so much to be out there again.

"Maybe that's what I'm supposed to do," he said, talking aloud to himself and listening to the sound of his voice. It sounded like it always had. "I could go out and live in the forest ... I've got the instincts for it, right?" And he knew that this was a big thing that he was suggesting, but it seemed so unreal that the impact did not even register. All he knew was that he had to get away, because being seen by his parents -- or by anyone -- was not an option. He didn't want to think about what would happen afterwards.

Hayaikawa imagined himself catching rabbits, fishing with his bare hands, and climbing up trees to get away from bears. It didn't seem like it'd be so hard. After all, foxes were designed to live in the woods, and he was a fox now, wasn't he?

He set a pizza cooking for dinner while he thought about what he would do, and imagined himself living off of the land, running barefoot through the trees and starting a tribe of fox people with other outcasts like him. These thoughts kept him occupied, and helped to take his mind off of things. But pretty soon his mom pulled up in the driveway, and Hayaikawa took off for his room and shut and locked the door.

He knew that it didn't make sense. But somehow, the thought of how he would deal with his parents didn't seem half as upsetting as the fact that he'd had to leave that pizza behind.

* * *

For awhile, the house was silent. He heard his mom watching TV in the living room, and after a little while he smelled smoke and heard her open the oven.

When his dad came home they started to talk around the table while eating his pizza, and Hayaikawa realized that he did not want to hear what they said. So he put on his headphones and turned up his loudest MP3s, and played more Flash games with the curtains drawn and the door locked. Later on, when his dad knocked on the door, he turned the volume up even louder, until he couldn't hear anything his dad was saying.

The headphones were kind of uncomfortable, since they weren't designed to fit onto a fox's ears. But he made himself tolerate it, because he did not want to talk to his parents. He couldn't talk to his parents. He was barely sane as it was, and if he had to confront them and see their reactions he knew that he would break down again. And he did not want that to happen. So he turned up the volume as loud as it would go, and felt like a heel for it but knew that he had to.

Finally his parents went to bed. And he took off the headphones and sat there in silence, and knew that he was just delaying the inevitable. But he couldn't deal with it now ... he didn't know when he'd be able to deal with it.

Hayaikawa was hungry, and his throat was dry. But he didn't want to go out there yet, not until they were sound asleep. So he kept on surfing the 'net.

An interesting idea occurred to Hayaikawa, and it was late enough at night that it made sense to him. So he went into his favorite IRC chat, and onto his favorite messageboards, and showed everyone the pictures he'd taken, just to see what would happen.

His thread didn't get too many hits, and most of the people on IRC ignored him. But a few of them said "o.o;;;" and told him that he was amazing with Photoshop, while the people on the messageboards said "lol" and told him that'd made their day. One person posted a lengthy critique, saying that Hayaikawa should have used better lighting conditions, and that he could see the seam where he'd cut-and-pasted the fox's head onto himself.

Hayaikawa was amused, and reiterated that he hadn't used photo editing software at all. Pretty soon somebody called him on it, and made him take a video on his webcam. But his webcam was an older model, and was not very light-sensitive. And in the light of his 40-watt overhead bulb, all that could be seen was a blur.

Most of the people who'd clicked on the link stopped watching him, but a handful of them continued, in between doing other things. And when Hayaikawa finally held his flashlight right up to his face and waved at the camera, and spoke for the microphone, and held open his muzzle and ran his tongue along his teeth, they said "o.o;;;" again and started telling everyone else to watch.

Hayaikawa was sweating by now, but it was late and he didn't feel he could back out. So he did his routine a few more times, and started taking requests like picking things up and balancing them on his nose. As time went on the requests got weirder and weirder, but it wasn't until someone insulted him that he got embarrassed and turned off the webcam. After that, he watched people speculate as to how he had done that, and realized that he did not want to tell them.

He went back to the forums, to see that he'd gotten a personal message:

i kno that u did not fotoshop thos pics. u r a real fox n i believ that u r.

Hayaikawa grinned. But that grin was frozen on his face as he read the next part:

my dad works for the fbi. i am teling him about u. i traced ur ip adress so i kno wher u live. he is coming to lok u away 4 EVER.

Beter start runing

And Hayaikawa knew, in his head, that this person was just a troll. But that's not what his heart thought. As soon as he read that, it said "I knew it. I knew this would happen. I'm dead. I'm so dead. My life is over, and I won't even get to tell my parents how much I ... "

He turned off the computer right there and curled up on his bed, rocking back and forth softly and holding his knees to his face. But he only did that for a second, because it reminded him of how long he had locked himself in his room, and when the last time he had used the restroom had been.

Hayaikawa got back to his feet, crawled over the piles of things on the floor and pressed one ear up to the door. When he heard nothing on the other side, he turned off the light, and carefully unlocked the door and went out.

* * *

When he got out of the restroom, it occurred to him that there was probably some leftover pizza in the refrigerator. He went down to the kitchen and got it out on a plate, then set it microwaving. By this time he was starving, but he was worried about the noise he was making, which seemed loud to his ears.

Finally, the microwave dinged, and he took the pizza out of it. Some of the cheese on top had charred, but it smelled and looked delicious, with tiny pools of hot grease amid deep-fried vegetables. Hayaikawa was about to start eating when he heard a door open elsewhere in the house, and his heart stopped.

He held his breath. He felt nothing but fear. His mind went blank. And the footsteps were almost there.

Hayaikawa dropped the dish next to the microwave, then dove behind the counter and cried "Stop!"

The footsteps stopped. Whomever it was said nothing.

Hayaikawa's mind raced. He tried to think of something to say. "I ... you ... you can't look at me right now!"

"What's wrong?" It was his father's voice, quiet as always.

Sweat poured down Hayaikawa's sides. "I don't know!" he cried. "It just happened!"

"What happened?"

"I can't tell you!" Now he wanted to cry.

The footsteps came closer, and Hayaikawa panicked. "Please, stop!" he cried.

"I got up to make sure that I locked the car. I will not look at you."

His father walked past him, opened the front door and went outside. There was the sound of a horn honking for a split-second, and the locks on the car cycling. Then his father came inside and closed and locked the door with his eyes closed.

He went back into the hallway without looking at Hayaikawa. And then he stopped there, as if waiting for something.

Hayaikawa let out his breath. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I know."

"I'll tell you what happened tomorrow," he said, without even thinking about it. "Okay?"

"Okay."

There was a pause. Then, finally, "Good night, Hayaikawa." His father went back to the bedroom, and Hayaikawa exhaled.

He sat down on the kitchen floor, his shirt soaked with sweat, too exhausted to do anything else. His eyes flicked up to the clock on the microwave; it was late, much later than he was used to staying up.

He microwaved another slice of pizza, then ate it and got out another. A little while after that he went to bed, so tired that he couldn't think straight. His last thought before falling asleep was that he'd committed to showing himself. But somehow, the thought no longer held much fear for him.

* * *

That night, he had control of his dreams again, and imagined himself becoming a human. The next morning, the start of the weekend, he woke up to find that it'd come true. This made explaining things to his parents a bit awkward. But he made french toast for them, and helped clean the house, and got all of his homework done early so that they could go watch a movie together. They all had a good time, and his parents soon forgot about the whole incident (or at least acted like they did).

Hayaikawa, however, did not. He still had those pics, and when he logged on to check his email he found that he had quite a following. But as the months went on, and turned into years, they forgot about what they'd seen, and explained it away in ways that made sense to him. Later on he was amused to hear people tell him about "the guy who put uploaded vids of himself as a fox," and to see how many hits those videos had.

He never gave any sign of recognizing his fox self, except for a knowing grin. But later on, when he'd moved out to live on his own, more videos started to circulate on the Internet, from the mysterious real anthro fox. Who knew how to mask his IP address, just in case.

And that real anthro fox was soon joined by others ...