Division-10

Track 3. Yorozuya no Yume

Originally posted: May 18, 2020

Summary: Ichiro dips his toes into the strange world of adult fiction and is pleasantly surprised by what he finds.

Author's note: This fic was written for HypMic rarepair week. I love rarepairs, and I really love IchiGen, so... I wrote this! The prompt for this one was "unrequited" and I just had a field day with it. Almost two years later and I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out, so I'd consider that a win.

-x-

Ichiro preferred light novels. They were familiar, having grown up with his nose buried in a book. They always made for a great distraction... Okay, maybe it was time he outgrew them, but adult fiction? He didn't know where to start.

He'd asked Saburo for a little guidance, what with him having a reading level that rivaled some of the strongest readers in college. Hell, Saburo was the type of person who'd read War and Peace for fun.

"Sorry Ichi-nii," he'd said. "That's something you'd be better off figuring out on your own. Discovery is part of the magic, you know?"

Ichiro, a little disappointed, mulled that over. Discovery is part of the magic, huh? Saburo had a point, but most of the books Ichiro "discovered" all had bright colorful covers with a cute anime girl printed on the front.

He perused the shelves of the local bookstore for the fifth or sixth time that week (he'd lost count). None of the covers jumped out at him yelling, "Hey! Read me!" No, they were all dull shades of green, and blue, and red, and sometimes, yellow. Those stood out a little more than the others, but if the covers didn't stand out, the titles definitely didn't.

Having little else to go by, he decided searching by author might yield better results. No luck. He didn't recognize any of the authors, either. This part of the bookstore felt so foreign to him, like he'd stepped foot on an alien planet. Or maybe he was the alien in this scenario?

When he was certain he wouldn't find anything to take home with him, his eyes swept over a name he did recognize. A skinny green book with the name Yumeno Gentaro printed on the spine in gold letters. Finally, he thought. He pulled the book off the shelf and scanned the cover. It was bare, but by now Ichiro was willing to overlook it.

He checked the spine, and read the title aloud. "Murasaki." Okay, a little vague, but none of the other titles on this shelf were any better. The title didn't tell him anything about what the book was about, and at this point, he didn't care. He took the book to the counter, checked out, and went straight home.

It took him a few weeks to get through the first chapters, what with the writing style being so foreign to him. He had trouble getting a clear image of the characters, or the setting for that matter, in his mind. Once he'd gotten over that initial hurdle, he breezed through the rest of the book within a few days.

At first he wasn't sure what to expect, but the book had managed to grip him after all. The story itself was rather simple, being such a slim book, but the way it was written was what inevitably drew him in.

The prose wasn't what he was used to, having only read fanfiction for most of his teenage years, but it was so... vivid. He simply had to have more of that world, and was determined to read everything Gentaro had ever written.

He pulled him up on Google that night, along with a list of all his works. He was disappointed to find out that Murasaki didn't have a sequel, at least not yet. He would just have to settle for literally anything else he'd written.

A photo of Gentaro was displayed on his Wikipedia page, and Ichiro found himself strangely drawn to it. He looked young in the photo, like it had been taken very early on in his career, and Ichiro was comparing the Gentaro he'd met in person with this one.