Freeze Frame: One-Shots

Dream Catch Me by Newton Faulkner

This is from Patreon! I hope you guys enjoy. Don't worry it's not angsty-- I figured we all needed a bit of cheer in this shitty quarantine. There are a lot of one-shots being posted to patreon and to the one-dollar tier as bonuses! If anyone is interested or has any questions, I've got you smh. That's also where you can read Freeze Forward and Fostered, both Freeze Frame AUs! 

Third person pov

It started shortly after she started at UA.

I close my eyes it's you

Lillian had never been one to have many dreams. They simply didn't come to her when she slept, and that was fine. It's not something she was particularly torn up over, or that she even thought about. It's just... how things were. Any dreams she had were the brief, foggy kind she couldn't remember anything about. Never were they like this. These dreams-- the ones she started having almost immediately after her first day of class-- were bright and vivid. So clear see would've thought they were real if not for the fact that she was still waking up every morning.

When they first started, she wanted nothing more than for them to stop. When she peered back at that time, she wouldn't trade those nights for anything in the entire world. Lillian had never been a big believer in fate, but she was sure that them meeting like that was supposed to happen. Where would she be if she hadn't had that place to escape to? Would she have nightmares about all she'd seen? Closing her eyes was now a comfort. It wasn't something to dread.

The first dream she had, she remembered thinking it was real. She hadn't even realized she was asleep. One moment she closed her eyes, and the next she was opening them to a grassy field full of colorful flowers and rolling plains. She was laying under a tree-- the only one in sight. It was the big kind with twisting branches that looked like it was pulled straight out of a fairytale. And when Lillian managed to blink her shock away and gather her bearings, she was able to turn her head to the left and see that she wasn't alone.

And I know now who I am

There was another boy there. A teenager like her, only he was massive. Well over six feet tall, lying there next to her and blinking at her like he couldn't believe she was there staring at him. Lillian had never screamed so loud in her life. What else was she supposed to do? She woke up in a grassy field after falling asleep in her perfectly normal bed in her perfectly normal house, and now she was finding out that she was alone with some gargantuan guy three times her size who she probably wouldn't be able to fend off if she tried.

He'd flinched and bolted upright at her shriek, shouting that it was a dream and to calm down. Which didn't make Lillian calm down. Back then, Lillian didn't know what the words 'calm down' meant. She was too anxious and erratic for something so simple! Instead, she burst into tears. The boy looked surprised, like he hadn't expected her to react to him in the slightest. As though this had happened before. It definitely hadn't. Lillian would remember something like this. Was there even a way to forget? The answer was no, there wasn't!

Lillian just sort of blubbered there for a moment, her knees curled under her. The boy sat criss-cross in front of her, a good seven to eight feet away. He was clearly trying to make himself smaller by hunching over, but it just made him more intimidating. Why was he so tall? Yet he looked her age. God didn't make people like that, right? He'd said this was a dream, so maybe she'd conjured him up... was this her sleep paralysis demon?! Her anxiety, humanized?!

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Lillian continued to panic for the next twenty minutes before finally managing to calm down and croak out a small apology. She didn't know why she was apologizing to someone who'd been watching her sleep, but she was. She felt sort of bad about screaming at him. Even if he wasn't like, real. Was he real? No, if he was real, she was probably the one who wasn't real. He'd said this was a dream. So he was fake. Right? Yes. That made sense.

"A-Ah, it's fine! I should be the one apologizing!" The other teen shook his head, waving his hands in front of him as he did so. His eyes were still wide as saucers, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "My name is Inasa Yaorashi. I've been having dreams like this with you in them since I was around eight, but this is the first time you've actually woken up and responded to me! I'm actually pretty surprised. I mean, normally you just lay th--"

He didn't get to finish. Lillian started to cry again.