𝐈𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 (English)

Chapter 9

It had been a couple of days now and Pyrrha still hadn't taken any one of a hundred chances she had to ask him to the dance. His nightly forays into dreams had been pretty tame of late; he'd been in the dreams of people he didn't know, and he'd done his best to just stay out of it and not interfere too much and woken up with healthy aura reserves as a result. Doctor Oobleck was happy with the progress but Jaune personally thought he was no closer to learning how to activate or deactivate it at will.

He had popped into Amber's dreams once more since then, a dream in which he and her just spent time together at a country inn of sorts. Nothing weird happened. They showed up, ate, talked, and rented two different rooms and he'd woken up at the same time he "fell asleep" in the dream. He still wasn't sure why everyone else's dreams were nightmares but hers were perfectly normal. Unless she had social anxiety worse than Ruby and the thought of eating dinner with a man was enough to count as a nightmare. He somehow doubted it.

After several days of making hints about the dance – up to and including complaining to Nora, within Pyrrha's hearing, that he didn't think anyone would want to go to the dance with him – he was starting to wonder if he hadn't misread Pyrrha's feelings entirely. The way she kept smiling when he expressed concern about the odds of having a date; the way she would respond by saying she didn't have one either, but then not show any interest in them fixing that issue together.

It had gotten to the point where he genuinely felt awkward bringing it up because he was worried Nora had figured it out and was feeling sorry for him – she was certainly shooting Pyrrha enough looks to imply some degree of irritation, and he didn't want Nora getting upset with Pyrrha or pressuring her into something she didn't want. So, he stopped. Oobleck's idea had just been that and he hadn't even been in Pyrrha's dream, so there was a good chance he was just wrong.

Pyrrha hadn't reacted to that either. There had been no negative or positive response to him stopping talking about the dance. Instead, they just carried on like normal, talking, being friends, and with her taking him up to the roof every night for one-on-one training. When transfers started piling into Beacon, he stopped worrying about it and started worrying about the sudden addition of so many other dreams to tumble into instead.

He wanted to be prepared for that, and Oobleck was busy, so he took to spending his afternoons, in between lessons and training with Pyrrha, at Beacon's library where he could go over books on psychology. They didn't always cover dreams but they did cover a lot of theories on how the mind worked, which was at least related in some way.

It was there that Blake found him. The faunus member of Team RWBY, though you wouldn't have known it with her bow back on, regarded him oddly from the narrow crook he'd found to read with a book propped on his knee. She had one as well, though he was sure from the cover that it was not something the school would ever stock in its library.

"That looks like heavy reading," said Blake, noting the thick tome in his lap.

"Uh. Yeah. I'm trying to expand my horizons. You come to read?"

"That is what a library is for."

Har de har. Jaune rolled his eyes at the stupid answer to a stupid question. He was a little surprised when Blake came and took the seat next to him but it wasn't like there were a lot of seats and tables available anyway. More students meant more people fighting for space. Blake seemed content to read in silence so he shrugged and went back to his box, not bothering to talk at all. He assumed that would be the end of it. Blake had never been the most sociable member of Team RWBY and he didn't think she'd ever sought a member of his team out just to chat.

"Parataxic distortions," said Blake, reading off his page. "Are you actually reading that? I've never even heard of such a thing before."

Left unsaid was the subtly implied suggestion that she didn't think he would have either. Which he supposed she was right on. He'd never been much of a book person before and this would have been well beyond his interest if not for his current situation. Being unwillingly sucked into people's heads had given him a good reason to start caring about psychology.