Chapter 1

"Wow, butterflies!" Meiru exclaimed. "They're so beautiful!"

She was walking through the park, delighted by the clouds of rainbow wings that rose in her wake. Roll tried to smile, but found it difficult as the memory of last night's dream flashed through her mind.

"My little butterfly…you're so beautiful…"

The nightmares would not leave. Each night for nearly a week, Roll would shut her eyes and fall into the dream. What the unseen speaker said varied from night to night, but the voice was always the same. The voice that sounded cruel and threatening, but hauntingly familiar.

She did her best to throw off the nightmare when she awoke. She could tell Meiru was worried. The girl was trying to make things easy for her, but once the weekend ended and she was back at school there was only so much she could do.

For her part, Roll was getting irritated with herself. They were just dreams. Nothing that could actually hurt her. They were simply figments of her imagination, a construct, a fairytale. Completely insubstantial and utterly incapable of damaging her.

And yet…

Whenever she so much as thought of them, she wanted to crawl away and hide. Maybe it was their persistence, the way she never slept a night without them. Or maybe it was the quiet menace in the voice she heard, the promise of horrors to come.

Either way, the dreams drained her. Meiru noticed, and was doing the best she could. She let Roll go to sleep before her, and woke her up only when she was about to leave for school, trying to let have as much sleep as possible to compensate for what the nightmares took from her.

The navis had noticed too. Rockman was the first to comment on it, remarking that she seemed unusually tired. She'd mouthed some excuse about a weird dream (which wasn't exactly a lie – the dream had been weird, she just hadn't told him it was terrifying) and he'd apparently accepted her at her word. Roll was too embarrassed to tell Rockman about her nightmares – after all, whatever had caused them couldn't be nearly as scary as some of the things he had been through.

She wished she could just figure out what had caused them. Meiru had advised her to think about anything that had happened recently that scared or unsettled her. Roll's mind had instantly flown to the events on Duo's Comet…and Dark Rockman.

In truth, Dark Rockman had unsettled Roll more than anything else. When she mentioned this to Meiru, her NetOp asked her what had happened while she and the others were imprisoned by the deranged navi. The waver in Meiru's voice left Roll with no doubt that she had wanted to ask her for some time, but was unsure how to broach the subject and afraid of the answers she would get.

But when Roll told Meiru she couldn't remember, she had been telling her the truth. Everything about her capture was a complete blank, and she could only assume she and the others had been kept in stasis. Nothing else would explain the total lack of even the faintest, foggiest memory relating to her captivity.

The ensuing conflict with Duo had been tense, but hardly anything to lose her head about. There was nothing particularly frightening or traumatic about either incident.

In short, Roll had no idea what had caused the nightmares, and no idea how they could be stopped. All she could do was soldier on, trying to deal with them and the terror they invoked.

oooooooo

"You my little butterfly, you're special."

Fear rocked her, but she knew she couldn't give in. "Don't call me that. I'm not a butterfly, and I'm certainly not yours!"

"You should be more grateful. I'm offering you a choice, which is more than your friends can say. So, what is your answer?"

"NO!"

Roll woke screaming. At first, she didn't know where the scream was coming from, then she realised her throat was aching. She got her voice under control almost immediately, body still tensed as her mind assimilated the fact that she was safe in her PET. She was safe, not…not wherever she had dreamed she was.

"Roll?"

Meiru took one look at her navi and knew what had happened. "That dream again?"

"Y-yeah."

Meiru's gaze was sympathetic and determined at the same time. "One nightmare I can buy, but you've been having the same one for almost a week. This can't be normal."

"No arguments there," Roll said shakily, still quite rattled, "But what can we do?"

Meiru's brow furrowed. "Maybe there's a glitch in whatever program gives you dreams. If that's the case, we can go to Dr. Hikari."

oooooooo

"So we've got some new prototypes for the Synchro Chip, and we'd like to test them out," Yuuichiro addressed Enzan and Netto, before being cut off by a small, red-haired whirlwind that rushed into the lab.

"Dr. Hikari!" Meiru called. "I need you to help Roll!"

"Roll!" Rockman yelped. "What happened to her?"

"She keeps having these nightmares-"

Enzan snorted. "I hope you didn't interrupt us for the sake of a few bad dreams, Sakurai."

"Meiru," Yuuichiro began, slightly more delicately. "Navis dream normally, which means they will have some nightmares, it's normal-"

"Is it normal to have the same nightmare for one week straight?" Meiru snapped, overriding them. "Is it normal for the nightmare to leave them as drained as if they'd just fought an entire Netbattle Tournament? Is it normal for them to thrash and cry out in pain? Is it normal for them to wake up screaming?" She didn't care what anyone said, Roll was clearly suffering from something – no matter what Dr. Hikari said, Meiru knew this was far from normal.

To her satisfaction, Yuuichiro looked startled. "Screaming?"

"Screaming?" Rockman echoed. The idea that Roll was having nightmares terrifying enough to make her scream was disturbing.

"Yeah," Roll answered from her PET, feeling embarrassed, like a kid who had wet the bed. But she only had to think on the nightmares before her resolve returned. Anything that might make them better…

"You've woken screaming every night for a week?" Yuuichiro asked, launching into 'professor mode'.

Roll nodded. "Except the first night. Meiru was awake, she realised I was having a nightmare and woke me up."

"Can you describe these dreams?"

Roll shuddered slightly. "There aren't any images, just sounds. Just a voice-"

"What kind of voice?" Netto looked puzzled.

"I don't know. It's male, definitely male, and though he sounds familiar I can't place him. But he sounds…cruel."

Yuuichiro had already urged Meiru to hook Roll up to his computer, and was tapping on the keys as he examined the PET's program. "What does the voice say? Does he tell you to do anything?"

"Whatever he says is different each night, but there are some things that are always the same."

"Such as?"

"He always calls me 'little butterfly', even though I've never been called that by anyone in my life! I don't know what he means by it, but I feel a chill shoot right up my spine whenever he calls me that. And there's always the question-"

"What question?" Rockman asked, not liking this dream one bit. He could see why it had scared her – the sheer sense of mysterious foreboding could be felt even through her simple, bland description.

"I don't know," Roll whispered. "I never actually hear the question. But I know how I have to answer. No. I have to say 'no', and keep saying it, over and over and over. Though I don't have an inkling of what he asked me, I know that to answer 'yes' would be the most horrifying thing I could ever do. But when I say 'no' he gets angry. He hurts me – it feels like having a hundred volts poured into my body – and…and I scream, and then I wake up."

Silence greeted the end of Roll's story.

"How intense are these dreams?" Yuuichiro asked.

"Far more than any others I've ever had. It feels…it feels real. Even when I wake up, it feels more like a memory than a dream."

"I'll check your operating systems," Yuuichiro muttered, "But I have to confess, I've never heard of something like this."

"It does sound very…bizarre." Enzan leaned over Yuuichiro's shoulder as he ran a diagnostic. "Anything unusual?"

Yuuichiro looked frustrated, typing rapid instructions into the computer, then stared intently at the screen. "Nothing," he huffed in frustration. "Roll's operating system is in perfect order."

"Then why's she having those nightmares?" Rockman asked from Netto's PET.

"I don't know," Yuuichiro mused. "I'll install a new Dream Matrix…maybe it's just over heated or something. If that doesn't fix the problem, then come see me again, okay?"

Roll and Meiru nodded.

"It'll be alright, you'll see," Netto encouraged, leaning over to grasp Meiru's hand.

In spite of the situation, Roll managed a giggle at the blush that stained her NetOp's face.

AN: Never seen Stream, but heard a rumour that Iceman, Glyde and Roll were held captive by the main villain for a while. Don't know if that's true, but it got me thinking. For the purpose of this fic, assume that they were captured by Dark Rockman sometime during his bid for power.