𝐈𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 (English)

Chapter 1

The village was burning.

Jaune thought he ought to be more worried about the fact, but he instead felt floaty and distant from it all. It wasn't a village he recognised, and the heat from the fire lacked any real temperature. He was also dressed in the same onesie pyjamas he'd gone to bed with, and he remembered going to bed in Beacon, so it didn't take much to connect the dots and realise he was dreaming.

"Huh. Cool." Jaune turned his hand over before him and watched as a burning ember blew over his skin. It lacked any heat and slipped by like grease. "I don't usually realise I'm dreaming in a dream. Not even when it should be obvious."

This wasn't like his normal dreams either; he usually dreamed boring, stressful dreams of being caught sneaking into Beacon, or of Weiss rejecting him in harsher and harsher ways, some so cruel that he doubted she'd ever do them in real life. In those dreams, Ruby, Pyrrha and Ren would laugh cruelly at him – which was so out of character for them that he really should have figured something was wrong, but he never did.

Sometimes he was running away too, and he had limitless stamina. The weird thing about dreams was that no matter how unrealistic or stupid they were, you always believed in them at the time. Or usually, anyway. This was one of the only times in memory he'd ever been awake in a dream.

"This is... what's the word? Lucid dreaming?" That sounded about right. Jaune bounced on his feet and imagined floating, and sure enough his feet lifted off the floor. "Okay, this is kind of cool actually." He closed his eyes and chanted, "Weiss in a bikini. Weiss in a bikini. Weiss in a bikini asking me to rub sun lotion into her body."

Weiss did not appear before him, scantily dressed – or not dressed at all – despite his wishes. It figured he wouldn't even be able to dream of her liking him, let alone win her affections in real life. What he got instead was a loud howl of a Beowolf; it was something that had him flinching until he reminded himself this was a dream and thus he was in no danger. He floated up a little higher just to be sure. Dream or not, he didn't want to imagine in excruciating detail the experience of being torn asunder.

It was up in the sky above the ruined village that he noticed the Grimm going for someone else. They were racing angrily toward a whirlwind of activity, where someone moved back and forth between them swinging a giant hammer. "Nora...?" wondered Jaune, out loud. "Why am I dreaming about Nora?"

The orange-hired girl wasn't in her pyjamas like him and wasn't in her usual clothes either. She was dressed oddly – like a child, even if she wasn't – and she was screaming furiously as she lashed out with her hammer, beating the face of a Beowolf in. It exploded into smoke, but unlike normal Grimm, that smoke coalesced into myriad snakes that raced in to bite her exposed face. Nora flinched and closed her eyes, and he noticed as sparkling light the teartracks that had long since dried across her cheeks. Jaune felt an angry sensation well up inside him. His dreams mocked and belittled him all the time, and that was fine, but hurting his friends was crossing the line.

"Not in my dream!"

Jaune flew in, hit the ground and swung his arm. He imagined Crocea Mors in it and sure enough the blade materialised, slashing up and through the necks of the snakes, causing them to burst into smoke and blow away. He wished he had the forethought to imagine up some clothes as well, but he was already moving over to place his back against Nora's. It wasn't the hot fantasy he might have wished it to be with Weiss, but it wasn't the first time he'd had a nightmare about letting down his team either, and he sure as hell wasn't going through another.

"Hey Nora." He injected as much joviality and confidence into his voice as he could. "Fancy running into you here. Wherever here is."

"W-Who...? Fearless leader...? Jaune...?"