"Hey...Soul. Get up," she told him. Soul's eyes fluttered open, adjusting to the fuzzy image of Maka standing above him. "It's time to go."

"Huh...What?" He cleared his fogged up mind and sat up in the empty hallway. He looked around, not seeing anymore monsters, or anymore tentacles reaching out to grab them, or anymore misleading shiny orbs of light trying to trick them into their heinous trap. "Where are we?" He asks her.

Maka lends him a hand, pulling him up from the cold concrete floor. "It is nothing. You were hallucinating from the madness. But it's okay now. I defeated it," she says, almost robotically.

"What happened?"

"While you were hallucinating, I defeated it. That was all," she said more casually than normal. "It's okay," Maka reassured him once more.

He should've known that it was not okay. He should've noticed that her once-lively olive-green eyes had become a distant and empty stare, hollow and blank instead of what they once were. He should've noticed that she no longer cleaned up his messes, or yelled at him to clean, or cooked dinner with heart like she used to. Or even put effort into her schoolwork like she always did.

Ever since that day, when they would return from school, Maka would take a seat on their couch with her book. But instead of opening it, she would just leave it on the coffee table and stare at it blankly with her hands tucked on her lap for hours upon hours. He had thought it was one of her depressed streaks that she rarely had, or maybe the mission didn't go perfectly as she wanted it to, but this time it was more than strange.

Secretly, he knew why he didn't acknowledge his meister's behavior sooner. 'As long as you're hear to protect me, I'll be fine,' she had told him. Those words stung in his chest as he remembered what he let happen to her. How he let those tentacle consume her. How he was completely useless in helping her. Soul found that he could not make himself look her directly in the eye, but never allowed his feelings to be shown in front of her. Because why would any meister want to know that their weapon thought himself to be weak and useless?

But from knowing all that had happened to them, it made him question what really went on.

Had all of it really been just a hallucination?

"It's okay..." she repeated everytime he asked if she was okay. "It's okay..." she'd say everytime she accidentally dropped a plate while doing the dishes, something that Maka almost never would do. "It's okay," she'd repeat like a broken record until the words became etched permanently in his mind.

A muscular hand shook his shoulder and shook him awake. "Wake up, Soul. You dozed off," the spiky blue-haired ninja boy says. Soul grasps his wrist, telling him to stop shaking him.

"Sorry to call you in so early in the morning," Stein addresses the group of Kid,Liz, Patty, BlackStar, Tsubaki, and Soul. "But this is urgent. As I've said, there is a way to save Maka from her endless nightmares. And it's extremely dangerous." Soul leans closer to him in his chair sleepily. "It can only be done by one person. Obviously, the one to save Maka is gonna be Soul, since he is the most capable one of getting closer to her."

"What are we planning on doing that requires all of us?" asks Kid.

"I'm glad you asked. This mission requires a lot of energy and a lot of Soul Resonance."

"Hey doc, would ya tell us what happened to Maka first?" BlackStar brazenly asks, yawning afterwards.

"Ah, yes. The type of madness that Soul and Maka had encountered is a special type that invades the body of its host, then controls their mind. This usually causes sudden changes in personality. Eventually, the madness will begin draining the energy of its victim through nightmares and dreams, until the person goes into a coma of never-ending nightmares from which they can't wake up from." The group gives him a horrified look, then turns their attention to Maka, who was still clutching her bedsheets tensely and whimpering. "This is why time is precious," he says, his expression darkening through his glassses.

The room fills with sullen silence as they realize the fate of their friend if they were to fail. Soul reaches up and squeezes the stitches of his scar, remembering that he had sworn to protect his meister at all cost. "Maka..." he murmurs softly, constraint filling his tone. "I understand the mission, Professor Stein. I will bring Maka back, even if it means that I won't come back." He stood up suddenly, shocking his friends. "I will save you," he says to Maka. She relaxes her tensed up body and her grip on his hand loosens, as if actually hearing his comforting words. "I promise."

"Good," Stein interrupts. "Is everyone ready then?" They all respond with a determined nod. "The only way to save her is if Soul goes into her mind and into her dreams. There, he must locate her and bring her out of the madness, wherever she is trapped. But be warned; the madness will be there at every turn, trying to tempt you to fall in it too. If that happens and if you do fall, then you will not able to save her, and you will end up just like her. Understand?" Soul nods grimly.

"Please be careful..." Tsubaki urges sadly.

"Yeah, Soul! You better bring her back!" BlackStar beams at him.

"Good luck," Kid encourages.

"We'll try our hardest, too," Liz and Patty offer their support. Soul smirks at them approvingly.

"Is everyone ready?" Stein asks, standing up from his chair. "Soul, have a seat and relax in that chair."

The weapons turned into their forms and landed in their meisters' hands with a magnificent light. Soul sits down in the chair and unwinds his body, leaning back all the way and dropping his shoulders and taking a deep breath. "Ready," he murmurs.

"Concentrate..." Stein's body, as well as everyone else's begin to emanate a soft glow. "Listen to the steady beat of our Chain Resonance. Use it like a metronome. When you find your soul fully relaxing, imagine youself leaving your body and enter into Maka's," the professor instructs. Soul listened ever so closely.

Then he found it. 'Can you hear it, Soul?' A little demon inside of his head had once told him. 'Their souls resonating in perfect harmony; it almost sounds like a song,' it would taunt. "It's up to you to find her, Soul." He hears Stein's voice one last time before he could feel himself being lifted up off the ground. Soul looks down in shock, and finds that he was ten feet off the floor, looking down on everybody resonating together. He looked directly below and saw his own body still sitting there in his chair, eyes squeezed shut. Peering at the rest of his body, he sees that it was translucent.

Enter Maka's body, he recalled Stein telling him. Soul looks down at the bed where she lay, and swooped down right above head. Reaching over to touch her hair, his hands get sucked into her body, and the world around him spins into darkness. "Good job, Soul," Stein's voice says, but it is very distant and unclear. "You've entered a realm of madness where reality meets dreams, where madness and sanity collide. Welcome to the Dreamscape."

A/N: I probably used a misquote from that little demon dude from episode 37, when they were doing the resonance chain link thingy. I was watching it the other day and found it quite fitting in this story :)

Please leave a review!

~Silverbunni712