Once Upon A Dream

A Third Encounter

Happy Birthday, Katsuki! This chapter is for you!

The next time we met, things were a lot more... chaotic. Instead of entering a dream after the end of its cycle or leaving on my own, a new connection yanked me from my current task of hunting for molars and bicuspids like a macabre Easter egg hunt and jerked me into a cluster of interconnected dreams, like I was being tossed into a car-wreck, one I had been trying to avoid for most of the night. The abrupt transition was a bit like experiencing vertigo as a dizzy wave of nausea hit me like a maverick from the sensation of being thrown off-balance.

The dream I entered was a mountain this time, nothing particularly special about it except for the fact that you couldn't see the top or the bottom of it- though I still knew it was a mountain somehow. Maybe it was the terrain or the occasional goat that leapt up the sheer cliff-side, but the paths were narrow and the air thin, though I could breath just fine. I had trained myself to change the will of dreams, not the other way around.

"What the hell?!" echoed his irate voice off the cliff-side. I looked down to see Katsuki Bakugou clinging to a tremulous cliff-side, his hands clenched into the rocky handholds without any of the usual harnesses, ropes, or picks that came with rock climbing equipment. His biceps bulged slightly in his sleeveless black shirt from the effort of holding himself up.

"Heya, Sparky. Long time no see," I waved amicably as I stood on the mountain path adjacent from where he was climbing, not surprised in the slightest that Bakugou both recognized me and was the cause of my being pulled here. Thoughts of him had been echoing in my mind from our last two encounters, faint glimmers among the silt of other scattered thoughts and dreams I had absorbed. It must have been something to do with the action movie I had fallen asleep to. The explosions must have sent a flicker of recognition into my subconscious and made processing his thoughts easier. I had called people to my dreams before, sure, but it was unusual for it to be the other way around. Something was up.

"What the hell are you doing here!?"

"I'd like to ask you the same thing. Are you an adrenaline junkie or are you just a really extreme rock-climber?"

Sparks and trickles of smoke leaped from Bakugou's unclenched fists, unable to be contained by his current swell of emotions though it lacked the usual firepower due to how high we were in the atmosphere (most dreamers, while capable of breaking reality, often still found themselves bound to its rules and physics). I guess this really was supposed to be his Quirk and not just an internal defense mechanism. It came too easy to simply be a wish-fulfillment or stress dream side-effect. No wonder he was so arrogant.

"Don't play dumb with me! I know you're not someone I made up. You're someone who's got a Quirk that allows you to wander into other people's heads, aren't you?" he growled intuitively as he continued climbing up the mountain. I froze briefly at his spot-on intuition. Normally, people with mental Quirks were the ones that caught onto that ability, having the best idea of knowing their own mind, so him having caught on so quickly threw me off-balance in more ways than one. The second time was him suddenly charging in with both his hands blasting explosions behind his back to propel him forward, closing in the distance between us at an abrupt pace than waiting for my answer.

"Now is that any way to treat your dream girl?" I smirked, unable to keep my snark in-check as I tactfully avoided the answering his question. I was on-edge and a tad peeved after being pulled away from a job when I had been close to making a breakthrough, especially since this had been the third time his dreams had done this to me. The other times I had managed to unplug myself from the dreams before I was noticed, but apparently I had not done it quickly enough. His dreams were like a gravity well, a star that tried to pull everything into its gravitational orbit.