Kiseki Lin: Ah, a new reviewer! And I totally agree~! I do want to see more of Kidd, Killer, and the other Supernovae. You can't just introduce a bunch of awesome looking characters and do nothing about them!!! Thanks for the review, and I'll continue doing my best!

Wolfsmond: Whew... yeah, there's not much on their behavior or character at all. Right now I can only go off what I've got. . What all of us got. Which isn't much. But I fancy the challenge. Thanks for reading and reviewing!

: Geez... that was a long review! ^^ Another new reviewer. Thanks! Lol, I know, the cliche'd girl falls into OP and falls instantly in love with someone is overused. I'm trying my best to take that and make it different. And you bring up the theory behind her dream world and her reality at a very good time cause this is what this chapter's all about. Well, it's more of an idea of what it might be about but no one's certain yet! (PS: Yeah, I totally agree, Sasuke's just... urrghhh...) Thanks for taking the time to drop a review!

Irenia: Nah, not with Kizaru. She doesn't like him very much anyways. Lol, I'm glad you like my story so much. If I don't update tomorrow, I'll send you a piece of the next chapter. Thanks for reviewing again!

Anywho, with that all over, I'd like to quickly warn people that there's no OP in this chapter.


Chapter Ten

The Dreamer's Argument

"Demetra. Demetra, wake up."

Demetra merely nodded again, as she had been doing so for the past two or so hours as Kizaru continued with his half-lecture half-destruction rampage across the archipelago. Many civilian bystanders had shut themselves inside their homes or completely evacuated when they witnessed the giant admiral strolling down the roads droning on about Tenryuubito customs while occasionally flicking a pirate or two away.

"Deme- come on, you didn't hit your head that hard…" Came the exasperated voice again. It took her a minute longer to realize it was no longer Kizaru's the lighthearted drawl she was listening to now. This voice was deeper, more serious, and completely devoid of the last-syllable emphasis Kizaru had made a habit of using.

"Huh- wazzat?" She mumbled blearily, finally trying for the first time in an hour to pay attention to her surroundings. Then she realized that the archipelago, the explosions, the screaming, the fleeing pirates, and the tall admiral besides her were all gone again. She was back in the junkyard, sprawled on her back with her head laying dangerously close to a pile of moldy socks. With a screech, Demetra attempted leaping to her feet and instead, her head smashed into something equally hard and two bodies collapsed to the ground clutching their offending parts in pain. "Owowowow! OW!"

The other body rolled off of her with both hands rubbing the new bump on his head. "Ow yourself!" The boy retorted, wincing as he felt the steadily swelling bruise. "Ow… damn, Deme. Your head's hard as ever."

"Ah. Ahh…" Her jaw dropped literally, not knowing what to say when she took in the boy kneeling in front of her clutching his head. Then she started screaming. "Gaaaaaah! Saber! Saber, you idiot! You're here! You're really here!"

In his absence, their leader had only gotten taller and lankier. Almost shyly, he peeked out from between his fingers and laughed softly. "Deme." He repeated again. Almost meaningfully.

Damn it. Damn it all. She wasn't supposed to be feeling the burn of her tears again or the excitement flooding through her person upon laying eyes on her former leader. She was supposed to be mad! Angry, yelling at him, trying to make him feel guilt for heaping all the blame of the group's disbandment on her, anything else but happiness! But it was the last thing she could deny. She was happy, genuinely happy to see her former friend well and healthy.

It seemed almost as if not a day had passed since she had last seen him crouched under that streetlight, face illuminated with florescent orange as she bandaged him up and he made that damning request. "You… you… bastard!" She finally, managed, unable to find any other words to describe him. "If you were going to disband the group, you should have told them the truth all along! I should have never gone along with your harebrained plans! Sylvia hates me now! Thanks a lot!" she gushed with one breath, punching him roughly in the shoulder despite the fact she was grinning widely. Her true emotions were too great to suppress under a mask of indignation or disappointment.

"Alright, alright Deme. I get it, I'm a bastard who couldn't face facts." He replied soothingly, catching her second punch casually.

"You ran." She declared accusingly, snatching back her hand quickly. The inky-haired boy in front of her went silent. "You're awfully brave when it comes to us but when it comes to playing the part of leader, you're an awful coward sometimes!"

"Okay, okay. That was about what, half a year ago?" Saber shook his head but he was still smiling. "You're the first to come back."

"I am?" Demetra's face scrunched up in confusion. "But Sylvia knew where you were."

He cut her off quickly. "And decided if I didn't want to be found, she shouldn't bother. I know that she and James waited longer than anyone else." Then his face finally turned serious for the first time since their meeting. "Which is why, I wonder why the person I've wronged the most has come back to find me?"

Carefully avoiding anymore molding foodstuffs, Demetra sat back calmly. "I needed advice."

"I'm not leader anymore, Demetra." Seemingly tired of resting on the ground, he stood and offered a hand to Demetra, which she took graciously. "Besides, didn't you make it clear what you thought of my actions that day?" Saber seemed saddened. "Can you trust me to advise you properly?"

"I trust that six months alone is enough to give you time to buck up and act like a leader." Demetra snapped, releasing his hand abruptly. "But no, that's not exactly why I know you're the best person to come to for my question. You once said, in college, you majored in philosophy."

"Yeah, and it did my life lots of good." Saber bitterly muttered. "College too. Drove my mum completely broke."

Demetra ignored this and plowed ahead. "I was wondering. What can you tell me about the 'Dream Argument'?"

"Are you serious?" Saber threw his head back and laughed. When he realized Demetra wasn't laughing along, but was shooting him a rather nasty glare, he sobered up immediately. "Dream Argument… something to do with Rene Descartes, right?" At her nod, he frowned thoughtfully and ran a hand through his hair. "Argh… it's been forever since I've had to recall this stuff. Give me a moment, Deme." At her frown, he quickly raised both hands defensively. "Don't get me all wrong, I'm happy what I've learned is finally going to be of some use to someone!"

After a while of fiddling with his fingers, he finally looked up. "Alright. You might want to head for a library to do further research but I can tell you some stuff right now to give you a springboard. Okay, so you know how when a person dreams, you don't really realize it's a dream?"

Demetra nodded again. "Yeah? What about it?"

He sighed and held up a hand. "Well if you think about it, you don't realize when you're dreaming. So the biggest question of this theory is, is the world we walk in really 'reality'? Or is it just a dream?"

'Just a dream…' Demetra stepped back wonderingly. It was true, she was never aware when she used to dream normal dreams. "But I'm awake right now and such, aren't I?"

"Aah, there's the question. Are you really awake? Or are you just dreaming of being awake?" Demetra went silent, her brows furrowed in frustration as her mind tried to come up with a comeback. Shaking his head with laughed, Saber continued. "Can't answer that, can you? Because you don't know what's really a dream because you're not aware of it. Until you wake up, and by chance, recall it, that is."

Once more, she nodded without thinking. "Well, it does make sense. So could you argue that a dream can be a reality? Or another world?"

"'A' reality?" He shrugged. "Well, if you think about it that way, what if everything we dreamed was another world of sorts? What if this world we're standing on right now, is just a dream? And there are perhaps, many people sharing this exact same dream from different worlds. Or maybe I'm the dreamer and everyone else is just apart of my made up world." Again, he shrugged his shoulders, up and down. "It's all just a theory and it's got some funny and pretty complicated arguments to it, but either way you think about it, it could be true. Don't you experience 'pain' in your dreams and you feel it while you're still dreaming?"

"Yeah, it's kind of scary." She thought back to the pleasant times when dreams were just that. Dreams of random events, purple skies, alien invasions, flying, etc. Just normal, wishful, hilarious dreams. Not alternate realities.

"I dreamed once of my mom getting stabbed- I felt the horror in my dreams. I screamed, shouted, vowed revenge, everything! I acted like I would have in the 'real world'. I woke up and dared myself to check on her." It was an embarrassing memory, Demetra could tell, as Saber flushed. "So you see, your emotions are still very much apart of you even though you dream. And in a sense, so are your senses."

Demetra pondered on this a little longer. "So if we were to go by these ideas, I could safely say that I might be sleeping in another world, dreaming of my life here? And that we're all just… dream people?"

Saber burst into applause, laughing lightly. "Yep, you've got it. Don't chew too hard on the idea though, it'll be certain to kill your brain. Just pick a side and stick to it. Believe it, or don't." He chucked, tilting his head questioningly. "So, did that help any?"

She grinned brightly in response, a real heartfelt smile and nodded. "Yeah, lots." Pausing, she shook the strange theories out of her mind and decided to take his advice and brood over them when she was home again. "Thanks, Saber."

"You're welcome." He replied, offering her his hand again. "Come on. You don't want to stay here I'm sure. It's almost eleven already." Shocked at how quickly time had passed already, Demetra took his hand as if she were in a daze and let him steer her through the back exit from the junkyard. "I live over there." He suddenly spoke, jabbing a thumb towards the direction of a line of trailers. "I didn't see you come in through this way, so you went the dangerous way. Alone, too." Saber scowled, giving her a playful shake. "I still think the same, you're not stupid, so don't do stupid things!"

Wincing at the reminder of what mayhem she had caused in her 'dream world', Demetra nodded quickly in agreement. "I didn't actually know there was a back way. Sylvia gave me the directions."

Saber coughed a couple times pointedly but said nothing more on that topic. "By the way, I found your scooter by the alley exit, and brought it over here."

It was only then she realized the shiny piece of metal jutting out against the wire fence was her own scooter. "Ah, thanks!"

He smirked gleefully and patted her warmly on the head. "Sorry about what… you had to go through with Sylvia though. I'll make my appearance someday and get that story straight. Oh, and by the way?" The dark-haired boy leaned in until he was breathing over her ear. "Use 2nd Street to get back home. Something big's about to happen on Main." Below them, Demetra saw the briefest flash of two long, curved knives, one in each of Saber's hand as he flicked them warningly as his expression turned dark, masking his true emotions. "You know what I mean. Don't make me have to bring these out again on your behalf." With that, he gave her another friendly jostle with his elbow and waved her off. She last saw his faded black jacket vanishing into one of the many trailers lined up against the fence.

--

Later that night as she watched the news on the television, she was grateful that Saber had never stopped looking out for all of them. With a sigh, she flicked the television shut and lay back on her bed, finally having the time to rethink everything Saber had given her.

If she had the power to appear in another world invisible, intangible, and completely undetected through her dreams, it was logical that it might work vice versa as well. 'Yeah! That makes perfect sense, if I could really make sure that my dream world isn't a dream, but another world.' Then she shivered involuntarily. 'That means it's possible I might have someone appearing in my bedroom every night and I can never tell! That's… creepy. What if it's a pervert?'

"H-Hello? Anyone there?" She called out tentatively. The silence wasn't anymore assuring. After all, she'd never given anyone any indication that she actually existed in her dream world, that was, until her intangibility had begun to wear off for some unknown reason. "Okay, deep breaths. Back to dreams." But even after she tried to calm her wandering, paranoid mind down, Demetra had no success making heads or tails of the Dream Argument theory. With a sigh, she plucked her diary from a pile of dirty laundry and dropped it open on her bed. Snatching a pen from the desk, she shuffled over to the diary and made herself comfortable.

People don't realize it when they dream, most of the time.

Dream Argument- Is this world real?

Here, she paused in her scribbling and tapped her pen twice against the words. Then she quickly jotted down:

What is 'real'?

Indeed, it was a good question now that Saber had gone and tossed a wrench into her ideals of what was real and what wasn't. What if she was a girl from her so-called 'dream world' dreaming of this world?

Or… what if two of her existed? One always dreaming of the other and the other dreaming of the other. However preposterous the notion was, Demetra was not quick about dismissing the idea. It was always possible, and she of all people ought to have known, given the fact she was cursed to dreaming another world.

Unable to think of anything else to jot down, Demetra sighed and flung the leather bound book back into its traditional pile of dirty clothing and quickly made sure her pocket knife was folded up and in her pocket. Briefly she mourned the loss of her steel pipe. Having a weapon with greater range had made her feel more secure, but now she had nothing but her small knife and whatever wits she could gather to herself. Finally, without knowing it, Demetra let her thoughts drift off as exhaustion settled in. She could wait for tomorrow to solve the puzzle.


Yeah, that's basically how dedicated I am when I'm into writing a fanfiction. I do research! Hahahaa!

Anywho, thanks for reading, comments are always appreciated!

-Kagetaka